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FOUNDED BY JOHN D. ROCKEFEHER 



THE IMAGINATION IN SPINOZA 
. AND HUME 

A COMPARATIVE STUDY IN THE LIGHT OF SOME RECENT 
CONTRIBUTIONS TO PSYCHOLOGY 

A DISSERTATION 

SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTIES OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOLS OF ARTS 

LITERATURE, AND SCIENCE, IN CANDIDACY FOR THE 

DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 

(department of philosophy) 



BY 

WILLARD CLARK GORE 



CHICAGO 

IQ02 



The library of 
congress, 

r>.«n Copies Received 

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COPYRIGHT ENTRY 

JLASS CL.YX.C n< 
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Copyright, iqg2 
By Willard Clark Gore 



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CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

Part I. A Statement of Spinoza's Theory of the Imagination - - - 7 

Sec. I. The Nature of Spinoza's Problem ... 7 

Sec. 2. The End Proposed by Spinoza as the Solution - - - 9 
Sec. 3. The Means for Attaining the End in - - - - -11 

(a) The Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione - - 11 

(b) The Tractatus Theologico-Politicus - - - - 16 

(c) The Ethics ...... ... . 23 

Sec. 4. Summary of the Statement of Spinoza's Theory of the Imagi- 
nation ---------- ^Q 

Part II. Hume's Theory of the Imagination ...... ^2 

Sec. 1. The Nature of Hume's Problem ------ 32 

Sec. 2. Senses in Which Hume Uses the Word "Imagination" - 33 

(a) Imagination Distinguished from Memory - - - 33 

(6) Imagination Distinguished from Reason - - - 35 
(<:) Imagination Distinguished from Habit, Association, and 

Emotion - - - - - - - - - 37 

Sec. 3. The Function of the Imagination in Hume's Theory of 

Knowledge --------- 40 

Sec. 4. Criticism - - - - - - - - -45 

Sec. 5. Summary Comparison of Spinoza and Hume - - - 46 

Part III. Psychology of the Imagination ........ ^g 

Sec. 1. The Use of Terms -------- 49 

Sec. 2. Recent Specific Contributions to the Psychology of the Imagi- 
nation ---------- 50 

Sec. 3. A Psychological Analysis of Image Development - - 54 

Applications and Conclusion - - - 71 



NOTE. 

The page references to Spinoza's writings refer either to the 
translation by Elwes, two volumes, London, 1 891, or to the 
Opera, two volumes, edited by Van Vloten and Land, The 
Hague, 1882-83. When both are referred to, E. designates the 
translation, and L. the Opera. The page references to Hume's 
writings refer to the Treatise of Humaji Nature, edited by Selby- 
Bigge, Oxford, 1896. 



A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE THEORIES OF THE 
IMAGINATION IN SPINOZA AND HUME. 

The object of this study is to make a specific test, or at least to find 
an illustration,- of the general proposition that philosophy, or meta- 
physics, and psychology form a logical partnership, an organic unity, 
which cannot be ignored or dissolved without impairing interests that 
each holds to be peculiarly its own. 

Such a proposition is liable to be greeted either as harmlessly com- 
monplace, or as hopelessly behind the times, or as absurdly prema- 
ture, according to the local conditions which it chances to encounter. 
Few would deny, I suppose, that philosophy and psychology are related 
members of one body of knowledge, and a good deal of philosophizing 
as to the organic nature of that relationship would doubtless be good- 
naturedly tolerated even by some who would be the first to resent the 
logical consequences of this kind of philosophizing. Again, there are 
those who, granting that philosophy, or " metaphysics," and psychology 
have been intimately associated in the past, perhaps not altogether to 
the detriment of the latter in some instances, would at the same time 
dwell upon the fact that psychology, following the example of the natural 
sciences, has long made good its escape from the leading-strings of its 
ancient mother. And, finally, there are those who would assert that a 
new and real unification of the two disciplines, a recognition of the 
partnership, would seem to be quite unwarrantable and premature, 
being without adequate scientific backing from any source, and thus 
affording a prospect so vague and remote as not to appear worthy of 
serious consideration. 

It is not so much with the intention of verifying the proposition or 
hypothesis in question as it is with the hope of making it less vague 
and remote in some particulars, that this critical examination of a nar- 
rowly restricted portion of the field has been attempted, namely, the 
theories regarding the imagination which are found in the philosophies 
of Spinoza and of Hume. No especial reason need be given for choos- 
ing this particular subject-matter, save that it is concerned with psycho- 
logical specimens which are found growing in philosophical soil ; many 

5 



6 THE IMAGINATION IN SPINOZA AND HUME 

other topics would doubtless have served the purpose as well, if not bet- 
ter. The method employed — that of presenting contrasting theories 
for mutual criticism — is purely subordinate to the end in view, and is 
rather an after-thought than an essential condition, since it occurred 
to the writer only after Part I, which deals with Spinoza's theory of the 
imagination, had taken what is practically its present form. 



PART I. 

A STATEMENT OF SPINOZA'S THEORY OF THE IMAGINATION. 

Spinoza's 'identification of the imagination with the source of all 
falsehood, error, and confusion — a doctrine which runs in varying forms 
through nearly all of his works, and which is so fully and consistently 
worked out, taking it as a whole, that it may fairly be called a theory 
of the imagination — is not to be intelligently stated or appreciated, it 
almost goes without saying, apart from the main body of his philosophy- 
What was the need, the problem, that this doctrine arose to meet ? 
What did it contribute toward the attainment of the end proposed as a 
solution ? In what respects, if any, does it appear inconsistent, or 
inadequate ? and why ? These questions openly confess to the assump- 
tions that Spinoza was conscious of a problem, did propose a certain 
end as a solution, and developed a theory of the imagination as one of 
the means — not necessarily the only one — of attaining the end. It is 
believed, however, that these assumptions rest on Spinoza's own state- 
ments, especially on those in the autobiographical portion of that 
propaedeutic to his philosophy, the Tractatus de Intellectus Emen- 
datione. 

SEC. I. THE NATURE OF SPINOZA'S PROBLEM. 

Experience, we are told in the Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione, 
had taught Spinoza that the commonly accepted goods of life are vain 
and futile; that the all-absorbing ideals commonly conceived to con- 
stitute the summum bonum — riches, fame, and the pleasures of sense — 
when realized are found to be uncertain and fleeting, followed by 
melancholy and a dulled intellect in the case of the pleasures of sense, 
and by perpetual dissatisfaction with successive attainment in the case 
of fame and riches. 

The same problem is suggested elsewhere in Spinoza's writings. 
In that earliest of his writings — the Dialogue between Understanding, 
Love, Reason, and Desire, composed probably four or five years prior 
to his excommunication — there is a trace of the same kind of dissatis- 
faction. At the beginning of the dialogue Love questions the Under- 
standing regarding the nature and existence of an absolutely perfect 
being; Understanding answers that such a being and the whole of 

7 



8 THE IMAGINATION IN SPINOZA AND HUME 

nature are one, and Reason is called upon to corroborate this intuitive 
assertion. Then Desire breaks in with an attempt to point out contra- 
dictions in the answers that Understanding and Reason have given; 
and advises Love to remain content with the things that he, Desire, 
has shown to her. Love turns on Desire with these bitter words : 

You shameless wretch ! What things have you shown to me, save those 
from which would follow my ruin ? For if I had ever allied myself to the 
things which you have shown me, from that hour I should have been pursued 
by the two arch-fiends of the human race — Hatred and Remorse — and now 
and then by Forgetfulness. Therefore I turn again to Reason. May he con- 
tinue, and stop the mouths of those fiends. (Sigwart, German transl., p. 26.) 

The same note is struck in the second part of the Brevis Tractatus 
de Deo, Hpmine et Beatudine, Chap. V, where we are told that we become 
weak and miserable through love of transient things. To be sure, 
there is a still harder fate possible* for us; for Spinoza concludes this 
paragraph by saying : 

If those who love transient things, which have some degree of reality, 
are so miserable, how is it possible to conceive the misery of those who love 
fame, riches, and the pleasures of sense, which have no reality at all ! 

The essentially objective reference of the dissatisfaction is the 
important thing to note. Spinoza's pessimism is far from the pessimism 
of Schopenhauer. It is not a despair born of a sense of the all-devour- 
ing, yet perpetually hungry, character of the will itself. It is not a 
pessimism with reference to the nature of desire itself, but it is a pes- 
simism, or — if that is too strong a word — a deep-seated dissatisfaction, 
with reference to the ordinary objects of desire. 

All the objects pursued by the multitude not only bring no remedy that 
tends to preserve our being, but even act as hindrances, causing the death 
not seldom of those who possess them, and always of those who are possessed 
by them. 1 

After mentioning examples of this fatal tendency, Spinoza con- 
cludes that : 

All these evils seem to have arisen from the fact that happiness or unhappi- 
ness is made wholly to depend on the quality of the object which we love. When 
a thing is not loved, no quarrels will arise concerning it — -no sadness will be 
felt if it perishes — no envy if it is possessed by another — no fear, no hatred ; 

1 "Ilia autem omnia, quae vulgus sequitur, non tantum nullum conferunt remedium ad nostrum esse 
conservandum, sed etiam id impediunt, et frequenter sunt causa interitus eorum, qui ea possident, et 
semper causa interitus eorum, qui ab iis possidentur." ( Trac. de Intell. Em., p. 4.) 



SPINOZA 'S THEORY OF THE IMAGINATION 9 

in short, no disturbances of the mind. All these arise from the love of what is 
perishable, such as the objects already mentioned. 1 

Let these brief statements, insignificant though they may appear in 
comparison with the great systematic developments of his thought, be 
given their due weight, and they will be found to afford some idea, it 
is believed, of Spinoza's fundamental problem, which was an ethical 
problem, perhaps the ethical problem, the problem as to the nature of 
the good. Scarcely more than the origin of this problem has been 
touched upon, its origin in the feeling of intense dissatisfaction with 
the fleeting and perishable objects, the barren ideals, which are pur- 
sued by the multitude, with the so-called goods of this life — riches, 
honor, and pleasure — with "the worldly hope men set their hearts 
upon," which — 

" Like snow upon the desert's dusty face, 
Lighting a little hour or two — is gone." 

It does not appear, however, that this dissatisfaction had any 
sentimental or aesthetic interest for Spinoza. Rather was it a stimulus 
to a solution, to the discovery of a true and eternal good. 

. Postquam me experientia docuit, omnia, quae in communi vita fre- 
quenter occurrunt, vana et futilia esse : . . . . constitui tandem inquirer e 
an aliquid daretur, quod verum bonum, et sui communicabile esset, et a quo 
solo, rejectis caetens omnibus, animus afhceretur ; imo an aliquid daretur, 
quo invento et acquisito, continua ac summa in aeternum fruerer laetitia. 
(True, de Intell. Em., p. 3.) 

To this positive interest in the problem we now pass. 

SEC. II. THE END PROPOSED BY SPINOZA AS THE SOLUTION. 

The end or ideal proposed by Spinoza as the solution, and virtu- 
ally set over against the fleeting, partial goods pursued by the multi- 
tude, is that of a true good, a verum bonum, an eternal, infinite good, a 
fixed good {fixum enim bonum quaerebam), a good " having the power 
to communicate itself, which would affect the mind singly, to the 
exclusion of all else ; " a good " the discovery and attainment of which 
would enable one to enjoy continuous, supreme, and unending happi- 
ness." But how is such a good to be obtained ? Spinoza says that he 
made many efforts to arrive at this new principle, or at any rate at a 

1 " Videbantur porro ex eo haec orta esse mala, quod tota felicitas aut infelicitas in hoc solo sita est, 
videlicet, in qualitate objecti, cui adhaeremus amore. Nam propter illud, quod non amatur, nunquam 
orientur lites, nulla erit tristitia, si pereat, nulla invidia, si ab alio possideatur, nullus timor, nullum, 
odium, et, ut verbo dicam, nullae commotiones animi: quae quidem omnia contingunt in amore eorum, 
quae perire possunt, uti haec omnia, de quibus modo locuti sumus." {Trac. de Intell. Em., p. 5.) 



io THE IMAGINATION IN SPINOZA AND HUME 

certainty concerning its existence, without changing the conduct and 
usual plan of his life, but in vain. Compromise was impossible. 
Either the ordinary pursuits and ideals of life must be abandoned, or 
else the quest for the verum bonum. He felt that he must choose 
between a possessed good uncertain and transient in its nature, and 
a good not uncertain in its nature {ftxum cnim bonum quaerebani), but 
uncertain in the possibility of its attainment. 

Further reflection convinced me that, if I could really get to the root of 
the matter, I should be leaving certain evils for a certain good. I thus per- 
ceived that I was in a state of great peril, and I compelled myself to seek 
with all my strength for a remedy, however uncertain it might be ; as a sick 
man struggling with a deadly disease, when he sees that death will surely be 
upon him unless a remedy be found, is compelled to seek such a remedy with 
all his strength, inasmuch as his whole hope lies therein. 1 

Spinoza's logical method, in the largest sense of the word, was con- 
ceived in this struggle. The fundamental significance of the logical 
method was, and is, that it emerged in the course of the struggle, and 
that it began at once to exercise a modifying influence upon the con- 
flicting elements, transforming the end and discovering the means for 
its realization. The end is transformed by being stated in intellectual 
terms. The highest good ceases to be a mystic abstraction set over 
against the partial, concrete values of the life that now is. Spinoza 
was forced to recognize that human weakness cannot attain in its own 
thoughts to the eternal order and fixed laws of nature. At the same 
time he asserted that a man can conceive a human character much 
more stable (multo firmiorem) than his own, and that such a man 
sees no reason why he should not acquire such a character, and is led 
to seek for means which will bring him to this pitch of perfection, 
calling everything which will serve as such a means a true good. 2 The 
highest good is that a man should arrive, together with other indi- 
viduals if possible, at the possession of this character. 3 And now 
comes Spinoza's statement of what this character is, a statement which, 
in virtue of its formulation in intellectual terms, opens the way to a 

ll 'Assidua autem meditatione eo perveni, ut viderem, quod turn, modo possem penitus deliberare, 
mala certa pro bono certo omitterem. Videbam enim me in summo versari periculo, et me cogi, reme- 
dium, quamvis incertum, summis viribus quaerere ; veluti aeger lethali morbo laborans, qui ubi mortem 
certam praevidet ni adhibeatur remedium, illud ipsum, quamvis incertum, summis viribus cogitur 
quaerere, nempe in eo tota ejus spes est sita." {Trac. de Intell. Em., p. 4.) 

2 ''Incitatur ad media quaerendum, quae ipsum ad talem ducant perfecticmem: et omne illud, quod 
potest esse medium, ut eo perveniat, vocatur verum bonum." {Ibid., p. 6.) 

3 " Summum autem bonum est eo pervenire, ut ille cum aliis individuis, si fieri potest, tali natura 
fruatur." {Ibid.) 



SPINOZA'S THEORY OF THE IMAGINATION II 

logic, to an account of the means for attaining the end. This char- 
acter, Spinoza says, is the knowledge of the union existing between 
the mind and the whole of nature. 1 

This, then, is the end for which I strive, to attain such a character myself, 
and to endeavor that many should attain to it with me. In other words, it is 
a part of my happiness to lend a helping hand, that many others may under- 
stand even as I do, so that their understanding and desire may entirely agree 
with my own.? 

SEC. III. THE MEANS FOR ATTAINING THE END. 

1 shall not attempt to make a very systematic statement under this 
heading, for fear of forcing an interpretation of Spinoza's philosophy. 
One of the most significant features of that philosophy is that it does 
not differentiate to any considerable extent between logical, psycho- 
logical, and ethical categories. Chiefly for the sake of convenience, 
then, as the field to be covered is exceedingly broad and diversified, I 
will partition it, with reference to the treatment of the imagination 
involved, into — 

I. The Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione, which works out a 
logical method ; 

•II. The Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, in which the theory of the 
imagination is effectively applied, and at the same time is much more 
fully developed ; and 

III. The Ethica, where further developments of the theory of the 
imagination are to be noted, especially on the more distinctively 
psychological and ethical sides. 

I. Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione. 

Spinoza first pointed out that, in order to attain the ideal character, 
which is a unity of self with the whole of nature, it is essential both to 
understand and to form a social order such as is most conducive to the 
attainment of this character by the greatest number with the least 
difficulty and danger. He then enumerates the following somewhat 
more specific measures : Moral philosophy, and the sciences of edu- 
cation, of medicine, and of mechanics. "But before all things," he 
continues, "a means must be devised for improving the understanding 
and purifying it, as far as may be at the outset, so that it may appre- 
hend things without error, and in the best possible way." In other 

1 " Quaenam autem ilia fit natura ostendemus suo loco, nimirum esse cognitionem unionis, quam 
mens cum tota Natura habet." {Ibid.) 

2 "Hie est itaque fines, ad quern tendo, talem scilicet naturam acquirere, et, ut multi mecum earn 
acquirant, conari; hoc est, de mea felicitate etiam est operam dare, ut alii multi idem atque ego intel- 
ligant, ut eorum intellectus et cupiditas prorsus cum meo intellectu et cupiditate conveniant." {Ibid.) 



I 2 THE IMAGINATION IN SPINOZA AND HUME 

words, it is a logic that Spinoza seeks to develop as the first and funda- 
mental means of controlling science and thus arriving at the ideal. 
To this task alone Spinoza addresses himself in the rest of the Tracta- 
tus de Intellectus Emendatione, and with it emerges his conscious logical 
method as distinguished from the larger logic of the situation, which 
I have attempted to follow up to this point. 

What might fairly be called his logical theory falls into two main 
divisions. The first of these divisions corresponds pretty closely to 
the larger logic of the situation, which I have just referred to, and 
leans toward a genetic view of logical processes. The second is 
devoted to logic or method in the narrower sense of the term — that is, 
logic as a body of rules. I will try to state his position far enough to 
make it clear where the treatment of imagination enters and plays its 
part. Under the first division, Spinoza discriminates three stages : 
(i) The end, to which we wish to direct all our thoughts. (" Habuimus 
hujusque primo Finem, ad quem omnes nostras cogitationes dirigere 
studemus," p. 15.) (2) The mode of perception best adapted to 
attaining the end ; corresponding, I believe, to what we should call the 
most effective attitude of mind. (3) The discovery of the best way to 
begin, namely, the use of every true idea as a standard. This corre- 
sponds in a way to what we should term the discovery of a working 
hypothesis, though for Spinoza there was absolutely nothing of a hypo- 
thetical character about the true idea. 

I will state more fully what Spinoza means by the standard idea, 
because it is in connection with the methods of determining it that the 
treatment of the imagination emerges. The standard idea is its own 
test of truth, because it is an instrument created by the native strength 
of the intellect. There is no test of truth for the intellect extrinsic or 
back of itself. A regressus ad infinitum is out of the question. "In 
order to know, there is no need to know that we know, much less to 
know that we know that we know .... for, in order to know that I 
know, I must first know." Spinoza's famous hammer illustration comes 
in here: "It would be as foolish to argue that men have no power of 
working iron because they must use a hammer, which in turn must 
have been made by another hammer, and that by another or by other 
tools, and so on to infinity, as it would be to argue that the mind 
could not know truth as truth." And again: "The reality of true 
thought does not acknowledge the object as its cause, but must depend 
on the actual power and nature of the understanding." Furthermore, 
not only does a true idea necessarily first of all exist in us as a natural 



SPINOZA'S THEORY OF THE IMAGINATION 13 

instrument, "but it is absolutely correlative with its physical object;" 
this is, of course, a fundamental assumption with Spinoza. 

Under the second division, Spinoza states his more specific prin- 
ciples of logic : 

1. The means of distinguishing a true idea from all other percep- 
tions. 

2. Rules for perceiving unknown things according to the standard 
of the true idea. We might be led to suspect that Spinoza had antici- 
pated what in principle corresponds to the .technique of modern 
laboratory procedure, but he confined himself to a warning against 
"confounding what is only in the understanding with that which is in 
the thing itself," and to a discussion of the conditions to be met in 
framing a good definition. 

3. An order which enables us to avoid useless labor (this corre- 
sponds to classification). 

4. The perfection of method, which would be when we had attained 
to the idea of the absolutely perfect being. "This is an observation 
which should be made at the outset, in order that we may arrive at the 
knowledge of such a being more quickly." 

The treatment of the imagination becomes immediately involved 
only in the discussion of the first of these four principles, namely, the 
means of distinguishing a true idea from all other perceptions. 

Should the reader raise the question, " Why did Spinoza need to 
propose means of distinguishing a true idea from all other perceptions, 
after the true idea had been declared to be its own witness of its truth? " 
an answer will be found in what Spinoza has to say concerning the 
validity of reasoning about the test of truth itself. He admits that, if 
"by some happy chance" anyone had stumbled upon the true idea, 
"in his investigations of nature," that is, if he had acquired new ideas 
in the proper order, according to the standard of the original true 
idea, he would never have doubted the truth of his knowledge, "inas- 
much as truth, as we have shown, makes itself manifest, and all things 
would flow, as it were, spontaneously toward him." But this rarely or 
never happens, Spinoza continues. This order of thinking, though 
"adopted by men in their inward meditations," is rarely employed in 
investigation of nature, because of current misconception, because it 
demands keen and accurate discernment, and, lastly, because " it is 
hindered by conditions of human life, which are, as we have already 
pointed out, extremely changeable." I have quoted this partly for 
the sake of showing in what form the original problem persists. It is 



14 THE IMAGINATION IN SPINOZA AND HUME 

at this particular point that the treatment of the imagination becomes 
explicit. 

There are three types of ideas which the mind, according to 
Spinoza, must be kept from confusing with true ideas. These three 
types are : fictitious, false, and doubtful ideas. All of these originate in 
the imagination, "that is, in certain sensations fortuitous (so to speak) 
and disconnected, arising, not from the power of the mind, but from 
external causes, according as the body, sleeping or waking, receives 
various motions." 

Spinoza perceives that he has appeared to beg the question, and 
requests that no one be astonished that "before proving the existence 
of body and other necessary things he has spoken of the imagination 
of the body and of its composition." The view taken is immaterial, he 
continues, so long as we know that the imagination is something indefi- 
nite, that it is essentially different from the understanding, that the 
mind with regard to it is passive. 

We can know "the true idea because it is simple or compounded 
of simple ideas," because.it is clear and distinct. But a "fictitious 
idea" cannot be clear and distinct. It is necessarily confused, 
"because the mind has only a partial knowledge of the object, and 
does not distinguish between the known and the unknown, and 
because it directs its attention promiscuously to all parts of the object 
at once without making distinctions." "Fiction never creates or fur- 
nishes the mind with anything new; only such things as are already in 
the brain or imagination are recalled to the memory, when the atten- 
tion is directed to them confusedly and all at once." The mind in 
imagination is at the mercy of its world. Chance associations rule. 
' For instance, we have remembrance of spoken words and of a tree ; 
when the mind directs itself to them confusedly, it forms the notion of 
a tree speaking." Again, we can know a true idea because it shows 
how and why something is or has been made. Imagination introduces 
the irrelevant. "If an architect conceives a building properly con- 
structed, though such a building may never have existed, and may 
never exist, nevertheless the idea is true ; and the idea remains true the 
same whether it be put into execution or not." But imagination 
asserts, not the essence, but the existence, of a building — to adapt 
Spinoza's illustration — without knowing whether the building really 
exists or not. So the true idea of a sphere is the concept of its con- 
struction by means of the revolution of a semicircle on the diameter. 
But imagination affirms something not contained in such a concept, as. 



SPINOZA'S THEORY OF THE IMAGINATION 15 

motion or rest of the semicircle apart from the relation of a semicircle 
to the production of a sphere. 

When the imagination and the understanding, or the perception of 
true ideas, appear to be associated, the danger is especially great, giving 
rise to complete deception. This occurs when certain things presented 
to the imagination also exist in the understanding. Then true and 
false ideas become confused. Spinoza instances the Stoics, who 
"heard that the soul is immortal, yet imagined it only confusedly; 
they imagined, also, and understood that very subtle bodies penetrate 
all others, and are penetrated by none. By combining these ideas, and 
being at the same time certain of the truth of the axiom, they forthwith 
became convinced that the mind consists of very subtle bodies; that these 
very subtle bodies cannot be divided, etc. But we are freed from mistakes 
of this kind, so long as we endeavor to examine all our perceptions by 
the standard of a given true idea." In another, though similar, way 
we confuse the intellect and the imagination. We think that what we 
more readily imagine is clearer to us ; that what we imagine, that we 
understand. Thus we violate the true deductive method, "the true 
order of progression" — putting first what should be last. 

There are other grave errors arising through not distinguishing 
accurately between the imagination and the understanding: such as 
" believing that extension must be localized; that it must be finite; that 
its parts are really distinct one from the other; that it is the primary 
and single foundation of all things; that it occupies more space at one 
time than any other; and other similar doctrines, all entirely opposed 
to the truth, as we shall duly show." 

Finally, an idea is stated, though not developed very far, in this 
tractatus, which is one of the fundamental ideas of the Spinozistic phi- 
losophy. The imagination is affected only by " particular, physical 
objects, and thus perceives things in a determinate number, duration, 
and quantity; " whereas the understanding perceives things not so 
much under "the condition of duration as under a certain form of 
eternity and in an infinite number." 

To put the substance of the matter in a sentence or two : The 
theory of the imagination furnishes a negative test of the standard 
idea. Let no trace of the imagination be found in it. Let no influ- 
ence from any external and particular object or time contaminate it. 
Let no confusion enter into it from without through the gates of 
sleeping-awake — for error is the dreaming of a waking man. "Error 
autem est vigilando sominare." Let the standard idea be the instru- 



1 6 THE IMAGINATION IN SPINOZA AND HUME 

ment created solely "per vim nativam" of the mind itself working 
according to fixed and eternal laws, the fulfilment of which is freedom. 

Assuming that we now have before us a fairly complete statement 
of the theory of the imagination as it is worked out in the Tractatus de 
Intellectus Emendatione, the true critical question that arises is: To what 
extent will it be found a useful means in attaining the end proposed, 
in solving the original problem ? Recall the nature of that problem — 
the fleeting, perishable, finite character of the commonly accepted 
goods of this life ; the sham, the self-deception of it all. What has 
Spinoza done save to identify this problem with the nature of the 
imagination, and then by rejecting the imagination to get rid of the 
problem — a solution by exclusion, by excommunication? Infinitely 
more ! it will be said. Has he not pointed out the way to the goal — 
the formation of that perfect character which is the knowledge of the 
unity of itself with the whole of nature — by showing how the indi- 
vidual himself, any individual who thinks, is by virtue of the very act 
of thought a creator of the instruments of truth with which to attain 
the goal? True, all this may have been won for the individual — but 
only at the cost of the essence of individuality itself. All spontaneity, 
all initiative, all variability, all progress is ruled out. " For the soul," 
Spinoza says, "acts according to fixed laws and is, as it were, an 
immaterial automaton." 1 

II. The Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. 

The object of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus is closely related to 
the general problem, because it aims to secure perfect freedom in carry- 
ing out the solution of the problem — freedom to think. The theory 
of the imagination worked out in this tractatus is one of the instru- 
ments with which to eliminate conflicting elements from the situation. 
In its application it receives further development and definition. 

It is possible to overemphasize the influence on Spinoza's life and 
thought of his excommunication. "This compels me," he is reported 
to have said on receiving the news, "to nothing which I should not 
otherwise have done." (Pollock, Life of Spinoza, p. 19.) Nevertheless, 
the excommunication has an important significance, in that it was an 
overt expression of a deep-seated conflict between the old and the new, 
between sacred tradition and ritual, and the spirit of growing scientific 

1 "At ideam veram simplicem esse ostendimus, aut ex simplicibus compositam, ut quae ostendit, quo- 
modo et cur aliquid fit aut factum sit, et quod ipsius effectus objectivi in anima procedunt ad rationem 
formalitatis ipsius objecti ; id quod idem est, quod veteres dixerunt, nempe veram scientiam procedere a 
causa ad effectus ; nisi quod nunquam, quod sciam, conceperunt, uti nos hie, animam secundum 
certas leges agentem, et quasi aliquod autotna spirituale" (Italics mine.) ( Trac, de Intell. Em., 
p. 29.) 



SPINOZA'S THEORY OF THE IMAGINATION 17 

thought and political freedom. Spinoza was not indifferent to this con- 
flict. His principal works, particularly this tractatus, show that he was 
keenly alive to it. 

This conflict finds here its most concentrated expression in the 
separation of theology from philosophy, of obedience from freedom to 
think. The separation is explained and justified, to a very large 
extent, by means of an analysis of the gift and function of prophecy, 
and bv a psychological distinction between the imagination and the 
understanding, developing with the analysis and at the same time con- 
trolling it. 

The analysis of the gift and function of prophecy, which occupies 
the first two chapters of the tractatus, follows two somewhat different 
lines of argument, and brings out clearly two different aspects of the 
imagination. A comparison of the introductory sentences of each 
chapter will serve as a statement of the contrast, and will also set before 
us (a) the definition from which the first line of argument proceeds, and 
(b) the conclusion which the second line of argument aims to support 
by empirical data : 

Prophecy, or revelation, is a sure knowledge revealed by God to man. 
A prophet is one who interprets the revelations of God to those who are 
unable to attain to sure knowledge of the matters revealed, and therefore 
can only apprehend them by simple faith. 1 

It follows from the last chapter that, as I have said, the prophets were 
endowed with unusually vivid imaginations, and not with unusually perfect 
minds. 2 

(a) A theory of the imagination becomes involved in the first of 
these two lines of argument as soon as the principle is laid down that the 
imagination is one of the three ways in which certa cognitio was revealed 
by God to man in the Scriptures, the other two being the vera vox that 
spoke to Moses, and the immediate communion of Christ with God — 
mind to mind. To be sure, Spinoza expressly states that the ordinary 
knowledge which we acquire by our natural faculties depends upon our 
knowledge of God and his eternal laws ; that the feeling of intellectual 
certainty is of the nature of a divine revelation — an idea elaborated 
in Chap. IV, and destined to be of transcendent importance in the 
Ethics. But with reference to prophecy, in all instances, save those of 

1 " Prophetia sive Revelatio est rei alicujus certa cognitio a Deo hominibus revelata. Propheta autem 
is est, qui Dei revelata iis interpretatur, qui rerum a Deo revelatarum certam cognitionem habere nequeunt, 
quique adeo mera fide res revelatas amplecti tantum possunt." (Cap. i.) 

2 "Ex superiore Capite, ut jam iudicavimus, sequitur, Prophetas non fuisse perfectiore mente 
praeditos, sed quidem potentia vividius imaginandi, quod Scripturae narrationes abunde etiam docent." 
(Cap. ii.) 



18 THE IMAGINATION IN SPINOZA AND HUME 

Moses and of Christ, the imagination is the sole instrument of divine 
revelation. Toward the close of the argument the deepest significance 
attaching to this instrument is made to depend on a quatenus, which in 
turn involves the moral character and peculiar power of the prophets, 
and finally depends upon the nature of a prophecy, as defined in the 
first paragraph of the chapter, quoted above, thus completing the circle 
and identifying imagination with the mind of God. More in detail, 
Spinoza enters upon a full discussion of the various meanings of the 
Hebrew word for "spirit," with the end in view of determining the rela- 
tion between spirit and prophecy, as illustrated in such scriptural 
phrases as : " The spirit of the Lord was upon a prophet," " The 
Lord breathed his spirit into men," "Men were filled with the spirit 
of God, with the Holy Spirit," etc. Such phrases mean, he concludes, 
"that prophets were endowed with peculiar and extraordinary power, 
and devoted themselves to piety with a special constancy; that thus 
they perceived the mind or thought of God; for it has been shown 
that God's spirit signifies in Hebrew God's mind or thought, and 
that the law which shows his mind and thought is called his spirit ; 
hence the imagination of the prophet, in so far as [quatenus) through 
it were revealed the degrees of God, may equally be called the mind of 
God, and the prophets be said to have possessed the mind of God." 1 
Quatenus, if it reduces the possibility of divine revelation to zero, 
makes the original definition of prophecy a mere form of words for 
a thing that has never existed. If, on the other hand, there has been 
such a thing as prophecy in the scriptural sense — and Spinoza never 
goes so far as to express a doubt of this assumption — then " in so far," 
quatenus, the imagination of the prophets and the mind of God were 
one. 

It is worth noting that in the paragraph immediately following this 
part of the discussion, Spinoza confesses his ignorance of the particu- 
lar way in which communication between the mind of God and the 
imagination of the prophet was effected, and declares the irrelevancy 
of any attempt at explanation. 

(b) The second line of argument develops and endeavors to sub- 
stantiate by evidence drawn from the Scriptures, and by an appeal to 

1,1 Nihil enim aliud significant, quam quod Prophetae virtutem singularem et supra communem 
habebant, quodque pietatem eximia animi constantia colebant. Deinde, quod Dei mentem sive senten- 
tiam percipiebant ; ostendimus enim, Spiritum Hebraice significare tarn mentem quam mentis sententiam, 
et hac de causa ipsam Legem, quia Dei mentem explicabat, Spiritum si\je mentem Dei vocari ; quare 
aequali jure imaginatio Prophetarum, quatenus per earn Dei decreta revelabantur, mens Dei etiam 
vocari poterat, Prophetaeque mentem Dei habuissedici poterant." (Italics mine.) {Trnc. Theol-Pol., 
cap. i, p. 390.) 



SPINOZA'S THEORY OF THE IMAGINATION 19 

common experience, the contrast between imagination and reason 
implied in the first sentence in Chap. II, quoted on p. 17. The most 
significant feature of the argument — a feature which not only antici- 
pates the contrast between inadequate and adequate ideas in the 
Ethics, but also touches the core of Spinoza's philosophic method — is 
the nature of the distinction between the imagination and the under- 
standing. It is a distinction between particulars and the universal ; 
between particulars as expressed in terms of opinions, biases, mental 
images — in short, the capacities of the private, subjective individual 
as such — and the universal as it necessarily follows from the nature of 
the thing perceived or seen. Out of this distinction grows on the 
logical side a distinction between two kinds of certitude, two kinds 
of validity — moral and mathematical. One line of certitude, the kind 
which the prophet experienced, is afforded by signs extrinsic to the 
revelation itself : " Simplex imaginatio non involvat ex sua natura certi- 
tudinem." Instances are given of the verification of prophecy by 
signs, which show " Prophetas semper signum aliquod habuisse, quo 
certi fiebant de rebus, quas Prophetice imaginabantur." (This state- 
ment is subsequently qualified : " Praeterea concedere possumus, 
Prophetas, qui nihil novi, nisi quod in Lege Mosis continentur. pro- 
phetabant, non indignisse signo, quia ex Lege confirmabantur.") The 
important point is that both sign and revelation varied according to 
the capacity and disposition of the individual. Numerous examples 
are given of the ways in which revelations may vary according to the 
mood, culture, and ideas of the individual prophets. Yet, differing as 
widely as they may in all these respects, there is one trait that true 
prophets share in common — high moral character. This affords the 
surest guarantee of certainty. " Nam Deus pios et electos numquam 
decipit." To give Spinoza's summary of the discussion with reference 
to the criteria of prophecy: 

The whole question of the certitude of prophecy was based on these three 
considerations : 

1. That the things revealed were imagined very vividly, affecting the 
prophets in the same way as things seen when awake. 

2. The presence of a sign. 

3. Lastly and chiefly, that the mind of the prophet was given wholly to 
what was right and good. (Chap, II. This summary is repeated and 
expounded further in Chap. XV.) 

Set over against prophetic certainty, or moral certainty, is mathe- 
matical certainty. The nature of this kind of certainty is intrinsic 



2 THE IMAGINATION IN SPINOZA AND HUME 

and deductive, self-involved and self-evolving. "Prophetica igitur 
hac in re naturali cedit cognitioni, quae nullo indiget signo, sed ex 
sua natura certitudinem involvit" (p. 393). The distinction between 
the two kinds of certitude is imbedded in a remarkable sentence, which 
may be quoted as a summary of the principal points brought out thus 
far: 

As, then, the certitude afforded to the prophets by signs was not mathe- 
matical (z. <?., did not follow necessarily from the perception of the 
thing perceived or seen), but only moral, and as the signs were only given 
to convince the prophet, it follows that such signs were given according to 
the opinions and capacity of each prophet, so that a sign which would con- 
vince one prophet would fall far short of convincing another who was imbued 
with different opinions. Therefore the signs varied according to the indi- 
vidual prophet. (Chap. II, E, p. 29, and L, p. 393.) 

From this discussion of the first two chapters of the trdctatus, 
involving points which, as Spinoza states at the close of the second 
chapter, are the only ones bearing on the end in view, namely, "ad 
separandam Philosophiam a Theologia," it is evident that we have to 
consider, on the one hand, two aspects of the imagination, two apparently 
irreconcilable aspects : (1) imagination as the sole instrument of the 
divine revelation of sure knowledge, certa cognitio, in all prophecy 
(save in the case of Moses and of Christ), as one with the mind of God ; 
and (2) as a particular, in the sense of private, variable, subjective, 
partial, embodiment of moral law. On the other hand, we have to 
consider understanding, intellectus " claris et distincta idea," which 
is its own witness of the truth. It is difficult to see how there can be 
any opposition between the first aspect of imagination and the under- 
standing. It is also difficult to see how it is any easier to reconcile 
the two aspects of imagination with each other than it is to reconcile 
the second aspect with the understanding itself. In short, the analysis 
gives us a two-faced imagination versus the understanding or intellectus. 

But this is not the place and time for a criticism as to logical con- 
sistency. Return we first to the problem itself and see how far the 
results of Spinoza's psychological and logical analysis will meet the 
situation successfully. Tradition, based on prophetic revelation, is at 
war with growing scientific and speculative thought. The conflict con- 
stitutes the problem. What Spinoza proposes as a solution is a cessa- 
tion of hostilities. He aims to define the province of each, so that 
each must remain within its own, and so that there will be no future 
possibility of conflict. To theology he assigns far the larger area — 



SPINOZA'S THEORY OF THE IMAGINATION 2 1 

practically the whole of moral education and spiritual guidance. The- 
ology is given jurisdiction over the many-headed multitude, over those 
who are untrained in " the deduction of conclusions from general truths 
a priori,''' and who "seek each for himself his own selfish interests, with 
no thought beyond the present and the immediate object." To them 
theology or religion — both as worship and as exponent of the highest 
moral law — can make its appeal, not in the form of reasoning deduct- 
ively from axioms and definitions, but only in terms of concrete 
human experiences. The law must be incarnated in particulars so 
vivid and personal that it becomes a living reality to him whose mind 
cannot grasp a clear and distinct generalization. The law can be 
effective only as it becomes some particular fragment of the individ- 
ual's fragmentary life. Hence the function of prophecy was the func- 
tion of adapting the universal moral law and will of God to the clouded 
and finite intelligences of the vast majority of humankind. " Pro- 
pheta autem is est, qui Dei revelata iis interpretatur, qui rerum a Deo 
revelatarum certam cognitionem habere nequeunt, quique adeo mera 
fide res revelatas amplecti tantum possunt." It is hardly necessary to 
state that according to Spinoza the function of prophecy and of the- 
ology was not to promote religious ecstasy; its function was social, 
moral — to effect through obedience to the law, as felt by the individ- 
ual, a secure and permanent organization of society. Of especial sig- 
nificance in this connection are the chapters on the vocation of the 
Hebrews, and the Hebrew theocracy, which declare that vocation to 
have been a monopoly neither on virtue nor on intelligence, but the 
establishment of a highly perfected and long-enduring social organiza- 
tion, in which religious, moral, and political control was one in the 
spirit of reverent and joyful obedience to laws divinely revealed. 

To philosophy, on the other hand, Spinoza assigns the narrow ter- 
ritory of the deductive or mathematical method of developing the 
divine law from clear and distinct ideas — narrow, because this rational 
insight into the divine nature of things is the blessed possibility of 
only a few. It, too, however, leads to salvation. 

Even he who should be ignorant of Scripture narratives, but who should 
know by natural reason {lumine naturale) that God exists, and who should 
have a true plan of life, would be altogether blessed — yes, more blessed than 
the common herd of believers, because besides true opinion he would possess 
also true and distinct ideas. 

It was most essential, however, not merely to assign different prov- 
inces to theology and philosophy, but to establish boundary lines that 



2 2 THE IMAGINATION IN SPINOZA AND HUME 

could never be infringed upon ; to show how the two could never 
again, from the nature of the case, be at war with one another. There 
were three instruments with which Spinoza endeavored to bring this 
about : (i) a theory of the imagination, (2) historical-biblical criticism, 
(3) a theory of the state. It would be difficult, perhaps irrelevant, to 
decide which of the three was of the most fundamental importance. 
All I shall attempt to do is to point out the function of the first, 
namely, of the theory of the imagination. The divinely revealed 
subject-matter of the Scriptures is the only subject-matter and body 
of doctrine, according to Spinoza, that theology can have ; for it is 
doubtful whether there have been any latter-day prophets. That sub- 
ject-matter was given and retained solely in terms of the imagination 
(excepting, always, in the case of Moses and of Christ). To speak 
more explicitly, that subject-matter was given and retained in terms of 
private, individual imaginations, flatly contradicting one another in 
mood, in training, and in matters of rational knowledge and belief. 
Therefore, the content of theology is embodied in individualistic terms, 
and is partial, variable, beclouded, and wayward. There is moral agree- 
ment between the particular, individualistic terms, a practical social unity 
to which they contribute, but no necessary intellectual agreement, no 
rational unity. The imagination is so arbitrary, so subjective, so par- 
tial — in both senses of the word — that it acquired certitude, validity, in 
prophecy, only through the presence of an objective, corroborating sign 
or witness. And even this sign or witness was not purely objective and 
rational, but varied with the character of the individual prophet. The 
very nature of the imagination, and the very nature of the unrational- 
ized individual who exercised it in prophecy, determine in themselves 
— or in itself, for both are one — the limits of theology. Beyond its 
particular and concrete content theology cannot logically pass. Its 
law was given by revelation, not derived by reason. Its law was revealed 
unto the flesh, not born of the spirit. Theology can read its data back- 
ward, but not forward — backward to the source, but not forward to a 
new generalization. Contradictory particulars may reflect the law, but 
the law cannot originate with them. It is just as possible for the logi- 
cally discrepant particulars of the imagination to generate a universal 
as it is for the differing rays of light from " the many-colored dome of 
glass " to become what they once were, " the white radiance of eter- 
nity." 

The success of Spinoza's theory of the imagination is apparent, 
if we accept his premises. The theory simply disarms theology of its 



SPINOZA'S THEORY OF THE IMAGINATION 23 

weapons of attack upon philosophy — or rather shows that theology 
has never possessed any logical weapons of attack upon the province 
of rational knowledge. Logically, theology must either abandon its 
own province altogether, renounce its revealed doctrine, and abdicate 
its authority over the hearts and the morals of the community; or else 
it must keep strictly within its broad territory, and make no attempt to 
limit the freedom of philosophic thought. Take into account as well 
the reinforcements which the theory of the imagination receives both 
from Spinoza's discussion of the authorship of the Scriptures — in 
which he anticipates the standpoint of modern biblical scholarship — 
and from Spinoza's theory of the state, which aims to show that the 
safety of the state lies in "the rule that religion is comprised solely 
in the exercise of charity and justice-, and that the rights of rulers in 
sacred, no less than in secular, matters should merely have to do with 
action, but that every man should think what he likes and say what he 
thinks" — take all this into account, and it is difficult to see that 
theology has not been excommunicated from philosophy as absolutely 
as Spinoza was excommunicated from the synagogue, only dispassion- 
ately and with no breathing of curses. 

Yet may we not fairly ask : Is this a solution sub specie aeternitatis? 
How long will a two-faced imagination be at peace with itself ? How 
long can the imagination and the understanding get on without each 
other? 

III. The Ethics. 

The theory of the imagination involved in the Ethics is the same 
theory as the one involved in the two tractati, but with further devel- 
opments and applications. The Ethics may be regarded as a more 
complete fulfilment of the logic worked out in the Tractatus de Intel- 
lectus Emendatione. In harmony with that logic, its movement may be 
described as the deductive evolution of the standard idea of an abso- 
lutely perfect being ; and its goal may be described as the intellectual 
unity of the self with nature, with humanity, and with God — the 
complete rationalization of existence. " Spinoza's greatness," says 
Hoffding {History of Mod. Phil., Vol. I, p. 314), "consists in the reso- 
lute carrying out of the thought that existence must be rational ; from 
which he concludes that its essence must be identity — absolute unity." 
Now, opposed to such a unity, to such a goal, is the imagination. 
Though rejected, it te still a lion in the path. For, as stated in the 
appendix to Book I of the Ethics, and as has been stated in the 
previous tractati, the imagination is found to be the source of all 



24 THE IMAGINATION IN SPINOZA AND HUME 

confused, erroneous, and inadequate ideas — these being the indices of 
personal prejudices, of individual capacities and limitations. This 
may be taken as an extremely condensed form of the theory of the 
imagination in the Ethics, in its resemblance to that of the tractati. 
The following are the important additions to the theory, or develop- 
ments of points previously implied : 

i. A physiological explanation of the origin of the imagination. 

2. A psychological explanation of the imagination as the source 
of error. 

3. Imagination the correlate of the body rather than the represen- 
tative of the object. 

4. Relation of the imagination to the emotions. 

5. Teleology and freedom as illusory. 

1. Spinoza gives a physiological explanation of the imagination 
on the hypothesis of animal spirits (II, 17, Cor. Proof). The state- 
ment is perfectly clear so far as it goes. But a comparison of this- 
passage with I, 15, Sch., brings out an interesting contradiction. The 
animal-spirits hypothesis, according to which Spinoza explains the 
origin of the imagination, involves the assumption of the existence of 
particular things: (1) external objects; (2) animal spirits, or the fluid 
parts of the human body; (3) the softer parts of the human body. In 
I, 15, Sch., however, he explains the origin of particular, finite things 
on the basis of the nature of the imagination as opposed to the 
intellect. In the former case we imagine because we are particular- 
ized, so to speak — -we are acted upon by particular, finite things; in 
the latter case, on the other hand, we particularize because we imagine. 1 
A remark let fall by Hume is pertinent here : "The same principle 
cannot be both the cause and the effect of another; and this is, perhaps, 
the only proposition concerning that relation, which is either intui- 
tively or demonstratively certain" (p. 90). There is oneway out of 
the contradiction involved in Spinoza's analysis of the imagination :: 
regard it as self-caused. But that will never do, for that would identify 
it with Substance. 

This apparently fatal circle of reasoning is not to be dismissed as 
a logical curiosity. It points to a deeper consequence; it frames and 
defines the nature of the underlying problem. This eddy in the cur- 
rent of Spinoza's stream of thought is a witness alike to the logic of 
rejection and to the ideal of unity. It marks a point at which the 

1 My indebtedness to Professor Dewey for this point is specific. See his article on the " Pantheism 
of Spinoza," in Jour, of Spec. Phil,, Vol. XVI, p. 249. 



SPINOZA'S THEORY OF THE IMAGINATION 25 

identity between Ursache and Wirkung, and Grund and Folge, 1 breaks 
down ; neither series is complete ; each borrows from, and lends to, 
the other. The categories may be diagrammed thus : 



^ < 

Grund : ;> Folge: 

Imagination as f Particulars. 

mind passive. I 

I Ursache: - » Wirkung : 

[ Animal spirits, etc. Imagination. 

2. Closely related to what I have called a physiological explana- 
tion of the imagination is the explanation of why the imagination is 
a source of error and confusion (ll, 40, Sch. 1). Both rest on the 
assumption of animal spirits and all that it implies. Spinoza con- 
ceives the bodv to be capable of forming only a certain number of 
images within itself at the same time. If the number be exceeded, the 
images will begin to be confused. If this number be largely exceeded, 
the images will become entirely confused with one another. In all 
this the mind parallels the body. Spinoza would not agree with Plato 
(Theaetetus, 194) that "the wax in the soul of anyone could be suffi- 
ciently deep and abundant, smooth and perfectly tempered," "pure 
and clear," so that " the impressions which pass through the senses 
and sink into the heart of the soul" could be retained as "true 
thoughts " "not liable to confusion." For Spinoza every soul would 
be, in this respect, essentially limited in rhe amount, if not in the 
quality, of its "wax." Like Plato, however, he would ascribe indis- 
tinctness and confusion to a multitude of impressions, " all jostled 
together in a little soul, which has no room." 

The point of the explanation was its application. And the appli- 
cation was made in accounting for the origin of general or generic 
terms, such as " being," " thing," " man," " horse," " dog," etc. " They 
arise, to wit, from the fact that so many images, for instance, of men, are 
formed simultaneously in the human mind, that the powers of the imagi- 
nation break down, not indeed utterly, but to the extent of the mind 
losing count of small differences between individuals, e. g., color, size, 
etc., and their definite number, and only distinctly imagining that in 
which all the individuals, in so far as the bodv is affected by them, 
agree" (II, 40, Sch. 1). 

1 Cf. Max Rackwitz, Studzen iiber Causalitat u. Identitat ah GrH?idprznczfiz'en des Spino- 
zismus (Halle, 1884). 



26 THE IMAGINATION IN SPINOZA AND HUME 

All that Spinoza has said with reference to this point is practically 

■an indictment of empirical or "inductive" logic. It is an indictment 

of any logic that regards generic ideas as common elements abstracted 

from particular instances, or made after the fashion of a composite 

photograph. 

So far as the whole theory of the imagination is concerned, how- 
ever, the most significant feature of this particular explanation is its 
bearing on Spinoza's concept of the individual — a concept whose 
fundamental importance becomes more and more apparent as our dis- 
cussion proceeds. Although the generic term is formed by abstracting 
the common element, and by losing track of differences, it does not 
follow that a generic term possessed by one individual will be identi- 
cal with the generic term of the same name possessed by any other 
individual. This for the reason that the images from which the term 
is abstracted are never alike in any two individuals. " We must, how- 
ever, bear in mind that these general notions are not formed by all 
men in the same way, but vary in each individual according as the 
point varies whereby the body has been most often affected, and which 
the mind most easily imagines or remembers " (II, 40, Sch. 1). In 
so far as we, as individuals, " form our general notions by abstracting 
them from particular things represented to our intellects fragmentarily, 
confusedlv, and without order, through our senses," we have the kind 
of knowledge that may be called opinion or imagination (II, 40, Sch. 2). 

3. Imagination the correlate of the body, rather than the repre- 
sentative of the object. 

This point is simply a phase of the two preceding points. " The 
imagination is an idea which indicates rather the disposition of the 
human body than the nature of the external body ; not indeed distinctly, 
but confusedly ; whence it comes to pass that the mind is said to err " 
(IV, 1, Sch.). Spinoza would differentiate clearly between the idea of 
Peter which constitutes the essence of Peter's mind, and the idea of 
Peter which is in another man, say Paul. The first is a true repre- 
sentative idea. The second is quite likely to be imagination ; it indi- 
cates rather the disposition of Paul's body than the nature of Peter 
(II, 17. Sch.). If we ask Spinoza how an individual can ever form an 
idea that does not indicate the present disposition of his body, rather 
than the nature of the object, we are, of course, referred to the paral- 
lelism of attributes. Or, if we pursue the matter and ask why the par- 
allelism of attributes will not assure to the correlate of the body the 
validity of a representative of the object, we shall come upon the 



SPINOZA'S THEORY OF THE IMAGINATION 27 

doctrine of error as privation (II, 23, 25, and IV, 1, Sch.). To use his 
illustration, when we look at the sun and imagine it to be but two 
hundred feet distant from us, the error does not lie solely in the 
imagination per se {cf. II, 17, Sch., last part), but in the fact that we do 
not yet possess the true knowledge of its distance. In other words, 
the error consists in taking the appearance for the reality. Error is, 
so to speak, negative reality. 

4. Relation of the imagination to the emotions. 

When Spinoza, in a ' : General Definition of the Emotions" (conclu- 
sion of Part III), states that "emotion, which is called a passivity of the 
soul, is a confused idea," etc., it is evident that emotion and imagination 
have been brought into close relationship to one another. What, then, 
we ask, is the nature and significance of this relationship ? I doubt 
the relevancy of entering upon a detailed discussion of Spinoza's theory 
of the emotions, and I therefore submit with little argument the follow- 
ing propositions : What the imagination is to knowledge, the emotions 
are to conduct. In other words, what the imagination is to the under- 
standing, the emotions are to the will. According to II, 49 Cor., the 
understanding and the will are identical. Is there any distinction to 
be made between imagination and emotion ? Hoffding calls attention 
to a contradiction between II, 49 Cor., and III, 9, Sch. According to 
the latter reference, knowledge is made dependent on will. However 
this may be, Spinoza appeared to regard the emotions, particularly 
desire, as presenting more of the active element of the mind than the 
imagination, which he repeatedly characterizes as the mind passive. 
"Desire is the actual essence of man, in so far as it is conceived, as 
determined to a particular activity by some given modification of itself 
.... By the term ' desire,' then, I here mean all men's endeavors, 
impulses, appetites, and volitions, which vary according to each man's 
disposition, and which are therefore not seldom opposed to one 
another, according as a man is drawn in different directions, and 
knows not where to turn " (III, "Definitions of Emotion," I). Put this 
with the definition of emotion (III, Def. Ill), and with the important 
Nota Bene, and the nature of the distinction between the emotions and 
imagination, and also the correspondence of one with the other, will 
be evident : 

By emotion I mean the modification of the body, whereby the active power 
of the said body is increased or diminished, aided or constrained, and also the 
ideas of such modifications. N. B. : If we can be the adequate cause of any 
of these modifications, I then call the emotion an activity, otherwise I call it 
a passion, or a state wherein the mind is passive. 



28 THE IMAGINATION IN SPINOZA AND HUME 

Emotion, thus viewed, partakes of the nature of both understand- 
ing and imagination, of both adequate and inadequate ideas. A good 
deal depends, of course, upon the "if" in the Nota Bene. In the 
last two books of the Ethics it is Spinoza's problem to show how it is 
truly possible for emotion to be an activity of the mind. A principle 
of activity is postulated in the emotion which may become its salva- 
tion. This view of emotion is due, I believe, to the fact that Spinoza 
kept in mind and emphasized the physiological side of emotion. "By 
emotion I mean the modifications of the body, whereby the active 
power of the said body," etc.; whereas the physiological explanation of 
the imagination appears to have been developed after the logical and 
psychological sides had already been worked out. The word " emo- 
tion," then, is used in two senses : (i) as an activity corresponding to, if 
not identical with, the activity of intelligence ; (2) as passion, corre- 
sponding to the imagination. 

Emotion as passive is akin to imagination in two important aspects: 
(1) It represents the element of individual variation, in the sense of 
haphazard discrepancy — "impulses, appetites, and .volitions, which 
vary according to each man's disposition, and which are therefore not 
seldom opposed to one another," etc. We have seen this element of 
spontaneous variation to be also a prevailing characteristic of the 
imagination, both in the tractati and in the Ethics. It is a form in 
which Spinoza's earliest problem persists, and which he is continually 
endeavoring to get rid of. (2) It represents the fact that the indi- 
vidual finds himself overpowered by causes external to him. Man is a 
prey to his passions. (Preface to IV; also IV, especially 2, 3-6.) The 
individual as such is conditioned to act by another finite thing, and 
that by another, and so on to infinity (I, 28). "The force whereby a 
man persists in existing is limited, and is infinitely surpassed by the 
power of external causes" (IV, 3). The whole doctrine of finite 
modes is involved. {Cf. I, Def. V, and proof to I, 28.) "Hence it 
follows that man is necessarily always a prey to his passions, that he 
follows and obeys the general order of nature, and that he accommo- 
dates himself thereto as much as the nature of things demands" (IV, 
4, Cor.). Passion results from the feeble struggle of the activity of the 
self against the overwhelming odds of nature. So feeble is the resist- 
ance offered by the self that the whole being appears to be helplessly 
swept along in the irresistible flood of passion. ' " We are in many 
ways driven about by external causes, and, like waves of the sea driven 
by contrary winds, we toss to and fro, unwitting of the issue and of our 



SPINOZA'S THEORY OF THE IMAGINATION 29 

fate" (III, 59, Sch.). All this is in principle equally true of the imagi- 
nation, though it is stated in the more remote and colorless terms of 
logical theory. The physiological explanation of imagination and of 
the way it forms abstractions from data — literally data — as discussed 
above, on pp. 24, 25, bears out the point. 

5. Teleology and freedom as illusory. 

Other aspects of the theory of the imagination in the Ethics, such 
as the illusion of freedom and the doctrine of final causes, though of 
great importance, do not demand a full discussion here, for they are 
simply inevitable applications of the theory as it has been repeatedly 
stated. Self-conscious freedom and the doctrine of final causes repre- 
sent for Spinoza wholly gratuitous projections of personal prejudices 
into the realm of natural law, self-deceptive attempts to derive a whole 
from discrepant and variable fragments {cf. I, Appendix; also III, 2, 
Sch.). 

The scope of this discussion does not include the Tractatus Politi- 
cus, for the reason that this tractatus contains no mention of the imagi- 
nation. But the fact itself is sufficiently important to mention. The 
role played by the imagination in the writings discussed above is 
assigned to the passions in the Tractatus Politicus — the passions versus 
reason. And the passions of the tractate' are the passions of the Ethics, 
which, as we saw, correspond closely to the imagination. {Cf. Chaps. I, 
5; II, 5, 6, 8, 14, 18; III, 6; VI, 1; VII, 2, 4.) Men are led more by 
blind desire than by reason. The passions to which men are prey 
make them enemies of one another. In the state of nature, every man, 
of course, has the right to do exactly as he pleases ; that is, the indi- 
vidual as natural is a sovereign — he can do no wrong. But his right 
to do exactly as he pleases is limited by his might, which in turn is so 
limited by the natural forces of which he is but a part, and by other 
hostile individuals, that his right is practically a nonentity, " existing 
in opinion rather than in fact." Hence there gradually emerges some 
form of. co-operation among men, some attempt to live according to 
reason, which is the law of common welfare {cf. Ethics, IV, 35, and 
Sch. 1 and 2). 

Spinoza's political theory readily lends itself to a statement in 
physical terms. Every individual is an atom possessing two qualities — 
the power of repelling all other atoms, passion ; and the power of 
attracting all other atoms, reason. As a gas becomes a solid, so does 
the state of nature become a commonwealth. But Spinoza in his quest 
for unity would reject the passions altogether, as mere empty space, 
and keep only the solidarity of the atom. 



30 THE IMAGINATION IN SPINOZA AND HUME 

This is not intended to be a fair or adequate statement of Spinoza's 
political theory. The theory of the imagination or of the passions 
does not receive in the Tractatus Politicus a new development that 
would warrant an attempt to discuss the matter fully, but perhaps 
enough has been said to indicate the general drift of the political 
theory and the part assigned to the externally conditioned individual. 

SEC. IV. SUMMARY OF THE STATEMENT OF SPINOZA'S THEORY OF THE 

IMAGINATION. 

It must be evident that the dualism into which Spinoza has fallen 
cuts far deeper than the psycho-physical dualism of Descartes. The 
dualism finds expression in the following forms : 

Imagination vs. understanding. 

Theology vs. philosophy. 

Inadequate vs. adequate ideas. 

Causes external vs. causes immanent. 

Passions vs. reason or virtue. 

Time vs. eternity. 

Finite quantity vs. infinity. 

Multiplicity of modes vs. unity of substance. 

Necessity vs. freedom. 

It is evident that the dualism may be approached from a psycho- 
logical, ethical, logical, or metaphysical standpoint. I shall endeavor 
to keep within close range of the psychological standpoint. 

Spinoza's problem, as we have seen, took its rise in a dissatisfaction 
which, though undoubtedly an expression of his character and training, 
was given an objective reference; it was a dissatisfaction with the com- 
monly accepted goods of life — riches, fame, and pleasure. The end 
proposed as a solution, that verum bonum, was also given an objective 
reference. It was that object which a man might love and never find 
wanting. In the process of getting from the uncertain and fleeting 
objects of the present to the contemplation and love of that fixed, 
supreme, and eternal object, a psychological mechanism had to be 
invented and worked out. The self was found to be made up of 
imagination and appetites, on the one side, and of understanding or 
reason, on the other. To the world of uncertain and fleeting objects 
corresponded the imagination and the appetites. To the unity of the 
whole world of nature corresponded the reason. , The problem was 
solved in its very statement — solved, that is, by identifying the imagi- 
nation with things finite (in the Ethics we saw how this identification 



SPINOZA'S THEORY OF THE IMAGINATION 31 

was effected through the circular reasoning that made the imagination 
the cause of things finite and things finite the cause of the imagina- 
tion), and then separating the imagination from reason. Much as the 
early Christian monks treated the world, the flesh, and the devil, so 
did Spinoza treat the imagination ; only that he rejected it, not for the 
sake of an other-world salvation, but for the sake of salvation in the 
eternal present of this world. It is perhaps impossible to overestimate 
the importance of the fact that Spinoza finally brought a psychological 
analysis to bear upon his problem. To so great an extent, however, 
was the analysis simply a reflection of the two kinds of objects with 
reference to which it was made that the self which he dissected out fell 
into two parts, quite as antagonistic and irreconcilable as the two kinds 
of objects given in the first place. 

Many critical questions have suggested themselves throughout the 
discussion, and still persist. They may be concentered in these two : 

i. How far can manifold, fragmentary, finite particulars and the 
imagination be identified ? 

2. How far can reason and the imagination be dissociated ? What 
becomes of the individual when cut in two in this fashion ? 



PART II. 
HUME'S THEORY OF THE IMAGINATION. 

I have been able to discover no finer or more suggestive answers 
to the questions just raised than the development of English sensa- 
tionalism, which was among .other things a criticism, though an 
unconscious one, of Spinoza's theory of the imagination. The very 
elements rejected by Spinoza as sources of error and confusion became 
the foundations, the unquestioned data, of the philosophies and 
psychologies of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. 

It will probably be sufficient for our purpose to examine only 
Hume's theory of the imagination. For Hume recapitulates the 
sensationalism of his predecessors ; at the same time frankly shearing 
away all inconsistent assumptions, and thus coming unawares upon 
inconsistencies in the central assumption itself. 

I shall attempt to show that Hume's unconscious criticism of 
Spinoza has a twofold significance : 

i. As revealing the value of an instrument that Spinoza criticised 
and discarded ; and 

2. As revealing, also, the difficulties in the way of elevating this 
instrument, as Hume proposed, to the rank of a supreme epistemo- 
logical principle ; or, to use Hume's words, to the rank of " the ulti- 
mate judge of all systems of philosophy " (p. 225). In a sense Spinoza 
was a critic of Hume, as well as Hume of Spinoza. 

SEC. I. THE NATURE OF HUME'S PROBLEM. 

Unlike Spinoza, Hume left behind him no explicit statement of the 
nature and origin of his problem. The nearest approach to such a 
statement is doubtless to be found in that sentence which Professor 
Huxley, in his work on Hume, regards as the keynote of the treatise : 

I found that the moral philosophy transmitted to us by antiquity labored 
under the same inconvenience that has been found in their natural philosophy, 
of being entirely hypothetical, and depending more upon invention than 
experience : everyone consulted his fancy in erecting schemes of virtue and 
happiness, without regarding human nature, upon which every moral conclu- 
sion must depend. 1 

1 Huxley : Hume, with Helps to the Study of Berkeley (New York, 1894) , p. 11. 

32 



HUMES THEORY OF THE IMAGINATION 33 

But this sounds more like Bacon than like Hume. The problem 
with which Hume came to be concerned was not so much how phi- 
losophy may be founded on experience as how experience itself is 
constituted. Just what this problem was, or at least what one impor- 
tant phase of it was, will become evident, I believe, in the course of the 
following discussion of Hume's theory of the imagination. I will 
make only a brief preliminary statement with reference to it. 

In shearing away all the inconsistent and metaphysical assumptions 
of his predecessors, Hume reduced sensationalism to sensations. The 
problem was how to build up out of these sensations the coherent and 
rational wholes of experience. It was in a way Kant's problem that 
Hume had to struggle with — the problem of how an individual 
experience is constituted, of how intrinsic relations are to be discovered 
and maintained, in place of the extrinsic metaphysical entities that had 
been begged or assumed in sensationalism up to that time. I shall 
attempt to show how Hume, in the straits of his problem, finally 
resorted to the imagination as the sole instrument capable of meeting 
the demand for a coherent and forward-moving individual experi- 
ence. 

SEC. II. SENSES IN WHICH HUME USES THE WORD "IMAGINATION." 

The word "imagination" recurs frequently throughout the Treatise 
of Human Nature, and in different senses. Hume acknowledges at 
least three different uses of the term : (i) when opposed to memory; 
(2) when opposed to reason ; (3) when opposed to neither, i. e., when 
"it is indifferent whether it be taken in the larger or more limited 
sense," or when "at least the context will explain the meaning" (p. 1 17, 
note). In this sense it is usually equivalent to " fancy." 

I. Imagination distinguished from memory. 

Imagination and memory are alike in that they are both repetitions 
of impressions, reproductions of past perceptions. They differ in two 
respects: (1) "The ideas of memory are much more lively and strong 
than those of the imagination." Ideas of memory approach the 
vivacity of the original perceptions. Those of the imagination have 
lost that vivacity and have become perfect ideas. (2) Memory repro- 
duces the arrangement of the original perceptions. Imagination is 
free to recombine them. "The imagination is not restrain'd to the 
same order and fornnwith the original impressions ; while the memory 
is in a manner ty'd down in that respect, without any power of varia- 
tion." (Book I, Part I, sec. 3, and Part III, sec. 5.) 



34 THE IMAGINATION IN SPINOZA AND HUME 

But Hume is too good a psychologist to allow these two distinc- 
tions to stand as hard and fast realities. In fact, he practically 
abandons both of them when he comes to the discussion of belief. In 
spite of the fact that memory preserves the order and arrangement of 
sense-perceptions, while imagination freely transposes them, we can 
never on that basis tell an idea of the memory from one of the 
imagination, "it being impossible to recall the past impressions, in 
order to compare them with our present ideas, and see whether their 
arrangement be exactly similar." Since, therefore, the memory is 
known neither by the order of its complex ideas nor by the nature of its 
simple ones — it being borne in mind that both memory and the imagi- 
nation "borrow their simple ideas from the impressions, and can never 
go beyond these original perceptions" — it follows that the differ- 
ence between it and the imagination lies in its superior force and 
vivacity. "A man may indulge his fancy in feigning any past scene 
of adventures ; nor would there be any possibility of distinguishing 
this from a remembrance of a like kind, were not the ideas of the 
imagination fainter and more obscure" (p. 85). It now becomes 
difficult to see how the second distinction mentioned in the preceding 
paragraph can have any value whatsoever. Even if it be a true dis- 
tinction, it is one of which we can never be directly aware ; it must 
always rest upon an uncertainty : if our ideas with reference to any 
experience are relatively faint, we may infer that we are using the 
imagination, a faculty which may be exercising its power of independ- 
ent reconstruction of ideas. But Hume will not allow even the first 
distinction mentioned in the preceding paragraph, the distinction of 
force and vivacity, to remain unqualified. An idea of the memory 
may lose its force and vivacity, and become an idea of the imagination. 
"We are frequently in doubt concerning the ideas of the memory, as 
they become very weak and feeble ; and are at a loss to determine 
whether any image proceeds from the fancy or the memory, when it is 
not drawn in such lively colours as distinguish that latter faculty. I 
think, I remember such an event, says one ; but am not sure. A long 
tract of time has almost worn it out of my memory, and leaves me 
uncertain whether or not it be the pure offspring of my fancy" (pp. 
85,86). "So, on the other hand, an idea of the imagination may 
acquire such force and vivacity, as to pass for an idea of the memory, 
and counterfeit its effects on the belief and judgment. This is noted 
in the case of liars ; who by the frequent repetition of their lies, come 
at last to believe and remember them, as realities; custom and habit 



HUME'S THEORY OF THE IMAGINATION 35 

having in this case, as in many others, the same influence on the mind 
as nature" (p. 86). But, we ask, if an idea may degenerate or develop 
in either direction, how is the distinction with reference to force and 
vivacity to be of any more service than the distinction with reference to 
correspondence and transformation ? How are we to know whether a 
given idea is a fiction of the imagination or a faithful reproduction of 
past experience ? If it has a force and liveliness, we must forsooth 
believe in it. But the idea itself may be either a faithful reproduction 
of past experience, or it may be a recombination and transformation 
of the imagination which has acquired such force and liveliness as to 
pass itself off for an idea of the memory. Hume would have us say, I 
presume, that as a rule belief, which is only another name for force 
and vivacity of perceptions and ideas, " attends the memory and the 
senses," and not the imagination ; as a rule, remembering is believing 
— just as seeing is believing — and imagining may be more or less of 
illusion ; but practically the distinction will not always hold true 
Sometimes we believe in the illusion, and disbelieve in the half- 
forgotten testimony of our senses. And Hume's psychology is so true 
to life that we can never tell whether we have a rule or an exception. 

Sb much for the distinctions between imagination and memory, 
involving belief. Hume gives us no explanation of the origin of these 
distinctions, nor anything but hints as to the forces that sweep them 
away. Let us now see how it fares with 

II. Imagination distinguished from reason. 

"When I oppose imagination to the memory, I mean the faculty, 
by which we form our fainter ideas. > When I oppose it to reason, I 
mean the same faculty, excluding only our demonstrative and probable 
reasonings" (p. 117, note.). The expression "the same faculty" is 
ambiguous in its reference ; but subsequent statements make it clear 
that Hume identifies reason and imagination to some extent, e. g., "to 
the understanding, that is, to the general and more established proper- 
ties of the imagination" (p. 267). The distinction between imagina- 
tion and reason grows sharper and deeper as the treatise proceeds — 
in this respect quite the contrary of the distinction between imagina- 
tion and memory. 

At first, imagination and reason appear to co-operate in one of the 
two worlds in which we live. These two worlds are (1) the world of 
memory and senses, with which, strictly speaking, in the nature of the 
terms as defined above, the imagination has nothing to do. This 
world is the system which we form of our impressions and ideas of 



36 THE IMAGINATION IN SPINOZA AND HUME 

memory; "and every particular of that system joined to the present 
impressions we are pleased to call a reality. But the mind stops not 
here" (p. 108). And we have (2) the world of judgment, in which, 
as the following quotation will make evident, imagination and reason 
work together in harmony; it is that system of perceptions which is 
"connected by custom, or if you will, by the relation of cause and 
effect . ..." (p. 10S). And as the mind "feels that it is in a manner 
necessarily determined to view these particular ideas, and that the 
custom or relation, by which it is determined, admits not of the least 
change, it forms them into a new system, which it likewise dignifies 
with the title of realities " (p. 108). 

'Tis this latter principle which peoples the world, and brings us acquainted 
with such existence, as by their removal in time and place, lie beyond the 
reach of the senses and memory. By means of it I paint the universe in my 
imagination, and fix my attention on any part of it I please. I form an idea 
of Rome, which I neither see nor remember; but which is connected with 
such impressions as I remember to have received from the conversation and 
books of travelers and historians. This idea of Rome I place in a certain 
situation on the idea of an object, which I call the globe. I join to it the 
conception of a particular government, and religion, and manners. I look 
backward and consider its first foundation ; its several revolutions, successes, 
and misfortunes. All this, and everything else, which I believe, are nothing 
but ideas ; tho' by their force and settled order, arising from custom and 
the relation of cause and effect, they distinguish themselves from the other 
ideas, which are merely the offspring of the imagination (p. 108). [Italics 
mine.] 

I have quoted the last paragraph in full, not only because it tells 
how harmoniously imagination and reason may work together, but also 
because it contains an example of the use of the word "imagination" 
in the third sense; that is, in a sense opposed or related neither to 
memory nor to reason. In other words, the paragraph contains two 
entirely different uses of the word. In the first instance the word is 
used in the sense of the handmaid of reason ; its ideas have the "force 
and settled order arising from custom and the relation of cause and 
effect." In the second instance the word is used in the sense of mere 
fancy and caprice. 

The occasional agreement and co-operation of the reason with the 
imagination is easier to note and record than the progress and out- 
come of the growing distinction and conflict between the two. I will 
not here attempt to trace all the turnings and windings of thought in 
and out and back and forth, in which reason is now "the discovery 



HUME'S THEORY OF THE IMAGINATION 37 

of truth and falsehood" (p. 458), and now the probability of proba- 
bilities ad infinitum, "till at last there remains nothing of the original 
probability, however great we may suppose it to have been, and how- 
ever small the diminution by every new uncertainty" (p. 182); and in 
which the imagination is now a mere fanciful transformation of ideas, 
and now the very foundation of the memory, the senses, and the under- 
standing (p. 265), and the bearer of causation and the objective world; 
until at length we are pulled up short by the startling antithesis : " We 
have, therefore, no choice left but betwixt a false reason and none at 
all" (p. 265). For the main features of this shifting interplay and 
growing distinction and conflict will come to light, I hope, in the 
impending discussion of the active part or function that imagination 
plays in Hume's theory of knowledge. 

III. Imagination distinguished from habit, association, and emo- 
tion. 

There are other important distinctions and relations between 
imagination and other categories of the mind, involved in the treatise, 
which should be taken into account, although they seem not to have 
had nearly so much importance for Hume as the distinctions and rela- 
tions discussed- above, or else were taken for granted. They are (1) 
imagination and custom or habit ; (2) imagination and the- laws of 
association ; and (3) imagination and the passions or emotions. As 
all but the last are involved in the discussion of causation and objec- 
tivity, brief statements will here suffice. 

1. The relation between custom, or habit, and imagination is 
extremely intimate. Imagination is clay in the hands of the potter, 
custom. " Custom takes the start and gives a bias to the imagina- 
tion " (p. 148). 

A significant distinction between imagination and reason is made 
in connection with this point (pp. 147-9). Custom lies at the bot- 
tom of both imagination and reason, imagination being conceived as 
the mediator between custom and reason, in a way that recalls the 
schematism of Kant. "According to my system, all reasonings are 
nothing but the effects of custom ; and custom has no influence, but 
by enlivening the imagination, and giving us a strong conception of 
any object" (p. 149). But imagination and reason are by no means 
identical or always in agreement. The imagination is, so to speak, the 
more plastic element, the more sensitive, fluent, impulsive element ; 
whereas the reason is more staid and sober and responds only to gen- 
eral rules (Book I, Part III, sec. 15), to acknowledged and conserva- 



38 THE IMAGINATION IN SPINOZA AND HUME 

tive principles. "The general rule is attributed to our judgment; as 
being more extensive and constant. The exception to the imagina- 
tion ; as being more capricious and uncertain" (p. 149). 

2. The relation between the principles of association of ideas — 
resemblance, contiguity, and causation — is similar to the relation 
between the imagination and custom. Without these principles of 
association, chance alone, as Hume says, would join the ideas of the 
imagination. In the chapter treating of the "Connexion or Associa- 
tion of Ideas " (Book I, Part I, sec. 4) Hume does little more than 
mention that third principle of association, cause and effect, leaving a 
thorough examination of it to another occasion. Anticipating, how- 
ever, our discussion of that examination, we may pause to note the 
circular reasoning involved in making the principle of cause and effect 
one of the guiding principles of the imagination, and then later in 
showing how the imagination is the only faculty that makes possible 
the idea of cause and effect. It would be anticipating too much to 
attempt to bring out at this point the full significance of this circle. 
It suggests the circular reasoning into which Spinoza fell in consider- 
ing the relation between the imagination and things finite. 

Another significant distinction between imagination and reason 
comes out in connection with this point. Reason is totally inadequate 
to afford any basis for the principles of association. Only the imagi- 
nation can do this. 

Reason can never shew us the connection of one object with another, 
tho' aided by experience, and the observation of their constant conjunction in 
all past instances. When the mind, therefore, passes from the idea or impres- 
sion of one object to the idea or belief of another, it is not determined by 
reason, but by certain principles, which associate together in the ideas of these 
objects, and unite them in the imagination. Had ideas no more union in the 
fancy than objects seem to have to the understanding, we could never draw 
any inference from causes to effects, nor repose belief in any matter of fact. 
The inference, therefore, depends solely on the union of ideas. (P. 92.) 

3. A discussion of the relation between the imagination and the 
passions, or emotions, involving Hume's fundamental moral category 
— sympathy — would take us too far afield of the theory of knowl- 
edge. It would hardly be relevant to our purpose to examine how 
"'tis on the imagination that pity entirely depends" (p. 371), or how 
"'tis certain, that sympathy is not always to the' present moment, but 
that we often feel by communication the pains and pleasures of others, 
which are not in being, and which we can only anticipate by the force 



HUME'S THEORY OF THE IMAGINATION 39 

of the imagination" (p. 385). But, at the risk of apparent digres- 
sion, I should like to call attention to a very fine piece of psycho- 
logical analysis in Book I, which, in discovering the mutual 
reinforcement of the imagination and the emotions, anticipates the 
modern organic-circuit interpretation of the reflex-arc theory. I 
will quote the whole paragraph, italicizing the most significant pas- 
sage : 

.... custom takes the start, and gives a bias to the imagination. 

To illustrate this by a familiar instance, let us consider the case of a man, 
who being hung out from a high tower in a cage of iron cannot forbear trem- 
bling, when he surveys the precipice below him, tho' he knows himself to be 
perfectly secure from falling, by his experience of the solidity of the iron, which 
supports him ; and tho' the ideas of fall and descent, and harm and death, be 
derived solely from custom and experie'nce. The same custom goes beyond 
the instances, from which it is derived, and to which it perfectly corresponds ; 
and influences his ideas of such objects as are in some respect resembling, but 
fall not precisely under the same rule. The circumstances of depth and descent 
strike so strongly upon him, that their influence cannot be destroyed by the con- 
trary circimistances of support and solidity, which ought to give him a perfect 
security. His imagination runs away with its object, and excites a passion 
proportioned to it. That passion turns back up07i the imagination and enlivens 
the idea ; which lively idea has a new influence on the passion, and in its 
turn augnients its force and violence ; and both his fancy and affections, thus 
mutually supporting each other, catise the whole to have a ve?y great influence 
upon him. (P. 148.) 

We certainly have before us a remarkable instance of how far 
Hume's native psychological sagacity could outrun the sensationalistic 
inheritance, which he elsewhere accepts uncritically. Had he only been 
able to take his man out of the iron cage which was hung out from the 
high tower, and set him down on firm ground, he might never have 
become the traditional means of awakening Kant from his dogmatic 
slumber. 

To conclude this portion of the subject. One thing is so evident, 
I believe, as not to need emphasis or further discussion — the fact that 
Hume wavers between a structural and a functional statement of the 
categories of the mind ; between an attempt to set up distinctions 
and determine boundary lines, on the one hand, and a candid recog- 
nition of the active, living, functioning character of the elements 
singled out by and for critical analysis, on the other. On the 
side of description, of structural distinctions, are (1) sense-percep- 
tion, (2) memory, (3) imagination, (4) reason, (5) habit, (6) principles 



40 THE IMAGINATION IN SPINOZA AND HUME 

of association, (7) emotions. They can be made to hold still, as it 
were, long enough to have their pictures taken. But on the side of 
explanation, of functional interpretation, note the interplay, the pro- 
tean shifting of character, the cinematographic display of activity. 
Sense-perceptions become either memory or imagination. Memory 
fades to imagination. Imagination wakes into memory — or more, ima- 
gination, after transforming and recombining the material given by 
sense-perceptions and memory, wakes into a new memory, or to an 
illusion that is taken for a memory. Reason and imagination are as one, 
like man and wife ; and then they fall out, and quarrel with one another 
till they find out that another element, custom or habit, has made them 
what they are, and till they learn that one of them is simply a deeper, 
more permanent crystallization of habit than the other. But reason has 
lost its plasticity, its progressive quality ; with the help of imagination 
it can give us the old world, the old Rome, but not the new ; it is a hope- 
less Tory. Therefore it is denied all participation in the principles of 
association. Imagination, however, can give us a new world, growing out 
of the old ; it is more like a Liberal Unionist. And finally we have the 
whole circuit of activity. Sense-perception reacts into conflicting 
habits ; ideas of memory and of imagination are brought into play ; 
these ideas exite the emotions ; the emotions in turn reinforce the sense- 
perceptions and react upon the imagination and "enliven" the idea, 
thereby making it more believable; and so on, causing "the whole to 
have a very great influence" on the man. 

We miss in Hume the brave show of logical consistency that we 
found in Spinoza. We miss the sense of completeness and finality 
that comes with a view of Spinoza's deductive hierarchy of systematic 
thought. Hume's analysis may, in contrast, appear to reduce the world 
of the spirit, to chaos. But there is life here. There may be small 
hint of division of labor, but there is a forecast of organic activity. 
There is a basis for a fine skepticism of rigid class distinctions, and for 
a faith in onward movement. 

SEC. III. THE FUNCTION OF THE IMAGINATION IN THE THEORY OF 

KNOWLEDGE. 

The function of imagination in Hume's theory of knowledge can 
be stated in a few words. It is the faculty which makes it possible for 
us to have the conception of causation and the conception of objec- 
tivity. Hume's expression for objectivity is the continued and dis- 
tinct, or independent, existence of objects. 



HUME'S THEORY OF THE IMAGINATION 41 

Hume never doubts the reality of causation or of objectivity, as I 
understand him, but is concerned solely in accounting for the way in 
which we come to have believable ideas of such realities. "We may 
begin with observing that the difficulty in the present case is not con- 
cerning the matter of fact, or whether the mind forms such a con- 
clusion concerning the continued existence of its perceptions, but only 
concerning the manner in which the conclusion is formed, and prin- 
ciples from which it is derived" (p. 206). The same would be true of 
causation. Hume becomes a skeptic with reference to all existing 
explanations of the way in which we come to form ideas of such real- 
ities, as I shall attempt to bring out in the course of this discussion, 
rather than a skeptic with reference to the existence of these realities 
themselves. In short, his interest seems to be psychological, rather 
than metaphysical or epistemological. 

Causation involves three essential factors : contiguity, or relations 
in space ; succession, or relations in time ; and necessary connection. 
The first two are given in ordinary sense-perception. But whence is 
the idea of necessary connection derived? If we observe that objects 
of one sort follow immediately objects of another sort, and if we remem- 
ber to have observed that this has been the case in all past instances in 
which these objects have been concerned, we say that they are constantly 
conjoined, and that in such a constant conjunction the antecedent is 
the cause of the consequent (Book I, Part III, sec. 6). Constant 
conjunction, at first sight, seems to be the same as necessary connec- 
tion, just as a case of unvarying post hoc would to all practical intents 
and purposes be the same as a propter hoc; provided, Hume would 
have to add, that we could know beforehand in some miraculous 
way that this was a case of unvarving post hoc. And yet "this new- 
discovered relation of a constant conjunction seems to advance us but 
very little on our way" (p. 88). For constant conjunction is nothing 
but the multiplication of instances. If a single instance of conjunc- 
tion between two objects can never give us the idea of necessarv con- 
nection, how can we get such an idea from the mere repetition of this 
instance ? " From the mere repetition of any past impression, even to 
infinity, there never will arise any new original idea, such as that of a 
necessary connexion ; and the number of impressions has in this case 
no more effect than if we confined ourselves to one only" (p. 88). 

The senses and the memory, then, can never give us the concept of 
causation. There remain two other possible sources, the reason and 
the imagination. Hume asks reason first. 



42 THE IMAGINATION IN SPINOZA AND HUME 

"If reason determined us, it would proceed upon that principle, 
that instances of which we have had no experience must resemble those of 
which we have had experience, and that the course of nature continues 
always the same" (p. 89). Such a proposition must rest either upon 
demonstrative knowledge or upon probability. It cannot rest upon 
demonstrative knowledge, for we have no demonstrative arguments 
that transcend experience. Neither can it rest upon probability, for 
even probability has to have some objective data on which to work; 
it can have nothing whatever to say in regard to those "instances of 
which we have had no experience." " Probability, as it discovers not 
the relations of ideas, considered as such, but only those of objects, 
must in some respects be founded on the impressions of our memory 
and senses, and in some respects on our ideas" (p. 89). Then follows 
one of the most remarkable sentences in the whole treatise, significant 
not only in its bearing upon present discussion, but in its anticipation 
of the famous dictum of Kant that forms of thought without sense-per- 
ceptions are empty, and sense-perceptions without forms of thought 
are blind: "Were there no mixture of any impression in our probable 
reasonings, the conclusion would be entirely chimerical : And were 
there no mixture of ideas, the action of the mind, in observing the 
relation, would, properly speaking, be sensation, not reasoning" 
(p. 89). 

The next step is the subtle distinction between presumption and 
probability. The idea of cause and effect is only a presumption. We 
presume the existence of an object similar to the usual attendant of 
another object. Now, the probability of cause and effect is unquestion- 
ably founded upon this presumption. But therefore it is impossible 
that this presumption can arise from probability. "The same principle 
cannot be both cause and effect of another; and this is, perhaps, the 
only proposition concerning that relation, which is either intuitively 
or demonstratively certain" (p. 90). 

Reason, then, which can create no new idea, is unable, either through 
demonstrative or probable arguments, to derive for us the concept of 
causality. The idea of necessary connection has been reduced to the 
narrow limits of a bare presumption. 

The imagination is the last resort. What is needed is some kind 
of psychological basis for the presumption which will transform it 
into an idea of necessary connection. In other words, what is needed 
is a faculty sufficiently plastic and coherent to carrry the mind beyond 
the present object or idea to an idea not present, but resembling the 



HUME'S THEORY OF THE IMAGINATION 43 

usual attendant of the present object or idea. This is exactly what 
imagination seems to be capable of doing, for "the imagination when 
set into any train of thinking, is apt to continue, even when its object 
fails it, and like a galley put in motion by the oars, carries on its 
course without any new impulse" (p. 198). The imagination is all the 
more inclined to do this, if the contiguous and successive objects have 
been repeated. The more frequent the repetition of any given con- 
tiguous and successive objects has been, the more readily the imagina- 
tion passes from the given present object to an idea resembling its 
absent attendant ; that is, from the experienced to the not-experienced. 
In other words, constant conjunction, operating upon the imagination 
by means of the principles of the association of ideas, makes possible 
what neither sense nor reason could give, namely, ideas which are not 
given in and through the present experience, but which resemble the 
impressions usually had in conjunction with this object which is now 
the sole content of sense-experience. When the mind in and through 
the carrying or propensive quality of the imagination passes from a 
present object to an absent attendant, it reasons from cause to effect, or 
from effect to cause. 

" But how does the mind know that it reasons thus from cause to 
effect ? How does it thereby get the idea of causation ? "The repe- 
tition of perfectly similar instances can never alone give rise to an 
original idea" (p. 163). Imagination makes it possible for us to do 
the passing from cause to effect or from effect to cause, but does it 
make it possible for us to know that we are doing it ? 

Hume's thought takes a peculiar turn at this juncture, which 
plainly makes the idea of causation completely a priori, or what Locke 
would call an idea of reflection, an "impression of reflection," to use 
Hume's phrase. 

Tho' the several resembling instances, which give rise to the idea of 
power, i. e., to the idea of causation, have no influence on each other, and can 
never produce any new quality in the object, which can be the model of that 
idea, yet the observation of this resemblance produces a new impression in 

the mind, which is its real model Necessity, then, is the effect of this 

observation, and is nothing but an internal impression of the mind, or a 

determination to carry our thoughts from one object to another The 

idea of necessity arises from some impression. There is no impression con- 
veyed by our senses, which can give rise to that idea. It must, therefore, be 
derived from some "internal impression, or impression of reflection. There 
is no internal impression which has any relation to the present business, 
but that propensity, which custom produces, to pass from the object to the 



44 THE IMAGINATION IN SPINOZA AND HUME 

idea of its usual attendant. This therefore is the essence of necessity. 
Upon the whole, necessity is something that exists in the mind, not in 
objects ; nor is it possible for us ever to form the most distant idea of it, 
considered as a quality in bodies. Either we have no idea of necessity, or 
necessity is nothing but that determination of the thought to pass from 
causes to effects and from effects to causes, according to their experienced 

union The efficacy or energy of causes is neither placed in the causes 

themselves, nor in the deity, nor in the concurrence of these two principles ; 
but belongs entirely to the soul, which considers the union of two or more 
objects in all past instances" (pp. 164-6). 

I shall not attempt to do justice to Hume's account of the way in 
which we arrive at the ideas of continued and independent existence 
of objects. But the course of reasoning is much the same as that 
involved in showing how we arrive at the idea of causation. The 
imagination, in virtue of its propensive quality, already referred to 
so often, is able to bridge over the gaps between interrupted sense- 
perceptions, and produce the opinion of a continued existence of 
body. This opinion is " prior to that of its distinct existence, and 
produces that latter principle." For belief in the continuity and 
identity of that which to our sense-perceptions appears only as inter- 
rupted fragments, must give rise to the opinion or fiction of the 
imagination that this continuity and identity is an objective reality, or, 
rather, "that these interrupted perceptions are connected by a real 
existence of which we are insensible" (p. 199). 

It is in the discussion of objectivity that reason and imagination 
come to blows again. And the idea of causation has a falling out with 
the idea of objectivity : (1) Reason tells us that " the doctrine of the inde- 
pendent existence of our sensible perceptions is contrary to the plain- 
est experience. This leads us backward upon our footsteps to perceive 
our error in attributing a continued existence to our perceptions"' 
(p. 210). The opinion of the identity of interrupted perceptions "can 
never arise from reason, but must arise from the imagination. The 
imagination is seduced into such an opinion only by means of the 
resemblance of certain perceptions, which we have the propension to 
suppose the same" (p. 209). "The imagination tells us that our 
resembling perceptions have a continued and uninterrupted existence, 
and are not annihilated by their absence. Reflection tells us that 
even our resembling perceptions are interrupted in their existence, 
and different from each other" (p. 215). Reason, paradoxically 
enough — reason, which is appealed to only with general rules and 
conservative principles — suddenly appears to object to imagination's 



HUME'S THEORY OF THE IMAGINATION 45 

becoming a lawgiver, a legislator of universal principles. Reason, I 
should say, appears to feel that its vested rights in the actual data of 
experience are being threatened. (2) Again, "when we reason from 
cause and effect, we conclude that neither color, sound, taste, nor 
smell have a continued and independent existence. When we exclude 
these sensible qualities there remains nothing in the universe which 
has such an existence" (p. 231). 

Imagination has made possible both the idea of causation and the 
idea of continued and independent existence — it is the only faculty 
that makes them possible — yet these two ideas are found to be incom- 
patible. Is it possible that a deep-seated conflict lurks within the 
very imagination itself? {Cf. p. 266.) 

SEC. IV. CRITICISM. 

At about this point in the discussion, difficulties, contradictions, 
self-involved criticism, which have been surging below, begin to come 
to the surface and threaten to wreck all that has been accomplished. 

I doubt whether there is in any literature a finer specimen of a 
confession of philosophic difficulties than the concluding chapter of 
Book I. In this chapter, and indeed throughout the Treatise, Hume 
makes it so evident what the contradictions are that we are in danger 
of missing their deeper significance. 

The following are brief statements of some of the difficulties and 
contradictions involved in the Treatise: 

1. The recurrent doubt as to whether such a faculty as the imagination 
can furnish the basis of a solid and rational system {cf. pp. 198, 217, 267). 

2. The ultimate inexplicability of (a) the cause of impression — 
" It will always be impossible to decide with certainty whether they 
arise immediately from the object, or are derived from the author of 
our being" (p. 84) — and the ultimate inexplicability of {b) causal con- 
junction. "We cannot penetrate into the reason of the conjunction. 
We only observe the thing itself, and always find that from the constant 
conjunction the objects acquire an union in the imagination." (P. 93.) 

3. Dilemma between illusion of the imagination and ineptitude of 
the reason — between false reason and none at all (pp. 267, 268). 

4. " Direct and total opposition betwixt our reason and our 
senses," involving a contradiction within the imagination itself (p. 
231). Imagination makes possible both the idea of causation and 
the idea of continued and independent existence. But when reason 
employs the former idea, it contradicts the latter. (3) and (4) taken 



46 THE IMAGINATION IN SPINOZA AND HUME 

together have a three-cornered conflict, involving reason, sense, and 
imagination. 

5. ' ; In short, there are two principles which I cannot render con- 
sistent: nor is it in my power to renounce either of them, viz., that all 
our distinct perceptions are distinct existences, and that the mind never 
perceives any real connection among distinct existences. Did our per- 
ceptions either inhere in something simple and individual, or did the 
mind perceive some real connection among them, there would be no 
difficulty in the case " (p. 636). 

6. A final resort to intuitionalism (pp. 164-6 and 629; especially 
p. 629, Appendix to Book I, Part III, sec. 6, which is too long to quote). 

I have said that it was an easy matter to find these difficulties and 
contradictions, and many others, in Hume's Treatise, but it is no easy 
matter to appreciate their true significance. Perhaps one of their 
chief functions is to arouse the questioning attitude — e. g., does not 
Hume end where Spinoza began, namely, with discrediting the imagi- 
nation as a source of truth ? Or, from another point of view, is there 
very much difference between Hume and Spinoza as to the practical 
outcome of their systems ? What matters it, after all, whether at the 
start sensations and images be rejected as useless lumber or accepted 
as foundations, if the outcome and final resort is to be in each case 
an appeal to a mystic or intuitional sense of immediate contact with 
reality? What is the use of all this machinery of ideas, sensations, 
images, emotions, and memories, if it only drives one to a resort 
where it never has been needed, and never will be ? Have the phi- 
losophers attempted to discover how this machinery came to be, and 
what it is really for? This last question seems to me to be aiming 
closer to the mark than any other. x\nd the nature of a solution of 
these difficulties and contradictions will be found, I believe, through 
an inquiry into the origin and evolution of psychological machinery, 
and its function in experience. 

SEC. V. SUMMARY COMPARISON OF SPINOZA AND HUME. 

The answers which I find in Hume to the questions proposed at 
the end of the statement of Spinoza's theory of the imagination are as 
follows : 

1. Manifold, fragmentary, finite particulars and the imagination 
cannot be identified. The imagination is a unifying activity. It 
possesses the power of rearranging, of recombining, the particulars of 
sense-experience which are given to it. The imagination is a plastic,. 



HUME'S THEORY OF THE IMAGINATION 47 

unifying, propensive element in whose flow particulars are held and 
carried along ; transcending the present, it gives us the idea of cause 
and effect, and of the distinct and continued existence of the objective 
world. The imagination is not Spinoza's reason or understanding, 
which sees things sub specie aetemitatis ; it gives us time, sequence of 
phenomena, progress. 

2. Reason and the imagination are often opposed to one another, 
but they could not long exist apart. It is difficult, because of the 
inconsistencies in Hume, to put the point in a more specific form. 
Part of the time, at any rate, his statements would warrant the infer- 
ence that reason divorced from the imagination would become abso- 
lutely rigid, inaccessible to the molding influence of custom; and that, 
on the other hand, imagination divorced from reason would become 
mere fancy. Curiously enough, it is reason with Hume that informs 
us that our perceptions are interrupted, in this respect corresponding 
exactly to the imagination with Spinoza ; whereas it is the imagination 
with Hume that gives us the continuity of the objective world to which 
our interrupted perceptions refer, in this respect corresponding exactly 
to reason with Spinoza. Yet in another view of the two categories 
they correspond respectively each to each : with both Spinoza and 
Hume the imagination is a source of individual variation, whereas the 
reason can originate no new idea. Reason is a coming to conscious- 
ness of laws given either by custom (Hume) or by God (Spinoza). 
With Hume, however, there appears to be no error necessarily bound 
up in the spontaneous character of the imagination. To be sure, 
absolutely undirected by custom or reason, the imagination might 
become mere fiction. But as it is actually constituted, its spontaneity 
is rather a propensive quality, an amoeboid movement, passing beyond 
this, that, and the other sense-perception, and leaving behind the 
formal fixity of reason. 

If Hume had completely solved his own difficulties, he would at 
the same time have answered Spinoza so effectively that further discus- 
sion of the matter would be superfluous. The difficulties which he 
himself recognized are those which some follower of Spinoza, had he 
been shrewd enough, might have pointed out. Such a follower of 
Spinoza would probably have begun with that passage in his master's 
Ethics which demonstrates how general ideas arise confusedly in the 
imagination by means of the agglutination of overcrowded images 
(cf. p. 27); and he would probably have asked how Hume's idea of 
causation differed from a general idea so formed. He miarht have 



40 THE IMAGINATION IN SPINOZA AND HUME 

pointed out, as Hume himself did, the contradictory character of the 
two concepts which the imagination offered to reason — the concept of 
causation, and the concept of continued and independent existence of 
objects. And he might have asked whence the validity of any deliv- 
erance of the imagination, seeing that it is constituted ex hypothesi, not 
by a universal act of thought, but by particular sense-perceptions, 
varying in quantity and in quality with every individual. 

Still, in spite of the conflicts between these two treatments of the 
imagination, both agree in one fundamental point; both regard the 
imagination as conditioned from without, as concerned with particulars 
given to it ready-made. Only with this difference : Spinoza regards 
the imagination as that aspect of the mind which is passive with refer- 
ence to the data imposed upon it from without ; whereas Hume regards 
the imagination as actively recombining its data, as passing from one 
group to another, as anticipating data not yet actually given. I believe 
this fundamental assumption to have been the source, to a very large 
extent, of Spinoza's one-sided conception of the imagination, and of 
his negation of individuality; and also a source of the difficulties in 
which Hume found himself — difficulties which any answers to Spi- 
noza's position, in case they flow from the same assumption, are liable 
to encounter. 

From the standpoint of this whole discussion, the chief value of 
the theories discussed above lies in the problems they suggest to psy- 
chology. These problems may be summed up and stated once more 
as follows : 

i. To what extent is the imagination to be held responsible for. the 
detached, fragmentary particulars of experience ? (Spinoza.) 

2. How far can the imagination be dissociated from the under- 
standing or reason ? (Spinoza.) 

3. To what extent is the imagination a unifying, anticipating activ- 
ity? (Hume.) 

4. To what extent is the imagination co-operative with reason ? 
(Hume.) 

5. Why does the imagination fail to give a firm foundation to a 
rational system of philosophy — and especially to the concepts of 
causation and substance, meaning by substance continued and inde- 
pendent existence ? (Hume.) 

6. Does the imagination simply receive or operate upon ready- 
made data, conveyed to it through the sense-organs ? To what extent 
is it merely receptive? To what extent is it creative ? (Spinoza and 
Hume.) 



PART III. 

PSYCHOLOGY OF THE IMAGINATION. 

SEC. I. THE USE OF TERMS. 

In the interests of division of labor it may sometimes be an advan- 
tage to distinguish carefully between the imagination and mental 
imagery, according to whether the attention of the observer is directed 
to the functional or to the structural aspect of the matter. The term 
"image," moreover, seems to be the more specific and scientific term. 
Mr. Wilfred Lay, in his monograph on mental imagery, draws a distinc- 
tion between the terms which is useful because it reflects the distinc- 
tion commonly made and accepted : 

By imagination is here meant the "faculty" generally called, more spe- 
cifically, creative imagination. It is that which makes great works of art, 
whether they be paintings, sculptures, poems, symphonies or cathedrals. 
The possession of the creative imagination implies that of mental imagery, but 
not vice versa. Imagination is something abstract and indescribable ; imagery 
is concrete and is experienced by every one. Imagination is something that 
cannot be itself represented in mental imagery save by a feeling ; mental 
images are, on the - other hand, quite as real (not objective, however) as 
sensations themselves, and play quite as important a role in our lives. The 
association in our minds of the creative imagination with mental imagery is 
somewhat far-fetched from the real nature of things, and is the result of the 
similarity and like etymology of the English words which are used for these 
two aspects of mental life. 1 

If I fail to use this distinction it will be because it seems unreal 
and fallacious when carried over from ordinary discourse into psycho- 
logical analysis. It is true that "imagination is something abstract 
and indescribable" — that is, apart from its embodiment in images or 
in outward physical forms. It is true that "the possession of the 
creative imagination implies that of mental imagery." But if we add 
"not vice versa," we are drawing an arbitrary line; we are viewing the 
matter from the outside, as we must do so often in practical emer- 
gencies when we say, for example, such and such people have no 
imagination, while certain others have. Psychologically speaking, 

1 Lav, "Mental Imagery " (supplement to Psychological Review, Vol. II, No. 3), p. 2. 

49 



50 THE IMAGINATION IN SPINOZA AND HUME 

every mental image is creative — creative in the same sense that imagi- 
nation is creative. To what extent this or that image may modity 
overt conduct or the arrangement of objects in space and time is a 
question of becoming aware of a fact ; it is not a question of becoming 
aware of a principle. In making this assertion I am anticipating, of 
course, a line of argument to be worked out later. 

SEC. II. RECENT SPECIFIC CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 

THE IMAGINATION. 

The great mass of material which has been put at the service of the 
psychology of the imagination since the investigations of Fechner and 
Galton were begun has been chiefly of a descriptive character. 
Images have been contrasted to and compared with sense-perceptions. 
The imagination has been analyzed into various types — visual, audi- 
tory, etc. — -each corresponding to a sense-organ. One of the most strik- 
ing facts that this analysis has brought to light is the wide variance 
between individuals with reference to the prevailing type of their 
imagery. As Professor James says : " There are imaginations, not 'the 
Imagination,' and they must be studied in detail" {Princ. of Psy., Vol. 
II, p. 50). Abundant and telling evidence of this fact has recently 
been furnished by the discussions and controversies regarding various 
types of word-imagery, which have been carried on by Strieker, Egger, 
Ballet, Baldwin, Dodge, and others. The testimony of Strieker, for 
example, appears to be flatly contradictory to that of Egger. Strieker 
describes his internal speech as being purely an affair of articulatory- 
motor images, as being inseparably bound up with sensations of inner- 
vation of his lip and tongue and throat muscles. Egger, on the other 
hand, describes his internal speech as being purely in terms of audi- 
tory images. All this serves to corroborate and give new emphasis to 
Spinoza's view that the imagination characterizes the individual in his 
differences from all other individuals. 

Attempts have been made, especially by French psychologists, to 
clothe this bare fact of individual variation with social meaning. 
Arreat, in his work entitled Memoir e . et imagination: peintres, 
musiciens, poetes et orateurs (Paris, 1895), first analyzes memory into 
motor, visual, auditory, emotional, and intellectual types ; then finds a 
type of imagination corresponding to each, and attempts to show how 
this varies in nature and development with the aptitude and vocation 
of the individual. Painters, for example [cf. Chap. II) have more 
definite and detailed visual images, and musicians more systematic 



PSYCHOLOGY OF THE IMAGINATION 51 

and accurate tone-images, than ordinary men. The intellectual type 
is feeble in artists, for example, who are by nature receptive and emo- 
tional. Still more explicit in the interpretation of individual differ- 
ences is Queyrat in his work entitled L 1 imagination et ses varietes chez 
V enfant: etude de psychologie experimental appliquee a V education intel- 
lectuelle (Paris, 1 895). Queyrat analyzes the imagination into three types 
— visual, audkory, and motor. His thesis is that predominance of a 
certain type determines aptitude for science, art, or professional life, as 
the case may be. Hence it becomes the duty of the educator to dis- 
cover the predominant type in the child, and thus to direct him intel- 
ligently in his choice of a vocation, at the same time developing other 
types harmoniously. ("La predominance dans un esprit d'un ordre 
d'images lui assure des aptitudes prononcees pour une science, un art, 
une profession. Le role de l'educateur est done de s'appliquer a la 
reconnaitre, arm, s'il y trouve real avantage, de possesser l'enfant dans 
la voie que lui trace la nature" (p. 156). 

Further developments in this direction — that is, in the direction of 
giving an immediate and specific social significance to individual 
variations of mental imagery — would be in the nature of detailed 
application. And a thorough test of the hypothesis would involve 
experiments on children and adults extending over a considerable 
period of time. I have not been able to learn of any such experi- 
ments. Hence the hypothesis can be criticised here only as to its 
logical merits. The attractiveness of the hypothesis lies in its possi- 
bility of affording a positive interpretation of individual variation, by 
connecting the variation with division of labor in society. The special 
type of imagery which an individual possesses, especially if he pos- 
sesses it to an unusual degree, makes him all the more fit, the hypothesis 
could readily be stretched to say, to discharge some particular function 
in the social organism. But the hypothesis is broad at the expense of 
depth. It is as superficial as it is attractive. It is premature. On the 
face of it, there is no more reason for associating a predominant type 
of mental imagery with a call to a particular vocation — say the visual 
type with the vocation of the artist — than there is in associating red 
hair with a fiery temper. It is true that there may be some deep- 
lying relation between the two ; but it is equally true that, until this 
relation has been made out, the comparison is merely one of superficial 
and inconstant reseitiblance — I say inconstant, because inquiries have 
revealed many exceptions to the supposed rule. 1 

1 Cf. Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty, pp. 88 and 94. C/\ Lay, Mental Imagery, pp. 
16-24. 



52 THE IMAGINATION IN SPINOZA AND HUME 

Ribot, in his recent and suggestive work on imagination (Essai sur 
V imagination creatrice, Paris, 1900), criticises the analysis of the imagi- 
nation into the various types as illusory and futile. Such an analysis, 
he says, does no more than point out the materials with which the 
imagination works. It has no more meaning than a classification of 
architectural structures on the basis of the materials employed ; say, a 
classification of monuments into those made of stone, brick, iron, wood, 
etc., without reference to differences in style (p. 150). Ribot then 
proposes the following classification of the principal types of imagina- 
tion : 

t. Plastic. 

2. Diffluent. 

3. Mystic. 

4. Scientific. 

5. Practical and mechanical. 

6. Commercial. 

7. Utopian. 

It is not necessary to reproduce his definitions of these types ; the 
essentially social and objective reference of the criterion of the classifi- 
cation is evident. Its value and its limitations fall together. Its 
value, to say nothing of the richness of detail with which Ribot has 
illuminated his pages, lies in the truth that the imagination does finally 
express itself in an objective world of fact. Ribot sums up this truth 
in the closing sentence of the book : " L'imagination constructive 
penetre la vie tout entiere, individuelle et collective, speculation et 
pratique, sous toutes ses formes : elle est partout." Its limitations lie 
in the disregard of psychological processes, sensorial or otherwise, that 
lead up to the objective, overt results; its limitations lie also in the 
assumption that the sense elements involved in the imagination are so 
much " material," on and with which the creative powers work. Ribot 
is also to be classed with Spinoza and Hume, in so far as he regards 
sense elements merely as the given, the raw stuff, the data of experience. 

A conception which, logically speaking, enables Ribot to analyze 
and classify the various types of imagery on an objective basis, and at 
the same time to regard the reproduced sense elements as so much 
" material," is the conception of the motor aspect of imagery. " La 
nature motrice de l'imagination constructive " is the title of the intro- 
ductory chapter, and is a theme that reappears again and again 
throughout the entire work. " Essayons de suivre pas a pas la transi- 
tion qui conduit de la reproduction pure et simple a la creation, en 



PSYCHOLOGY OF THE IMAGINATION 53 

montrant la persistance et la preponderance de l'element moteur a 
mesure qu'on s'eleve de la repetition a l'invention " (p. 1). Even in a 
purely reproductory image a motor element is present, Ribot would 
say, for such an image is a residue of an anterior perception ; and per- 
ception always involves movements. In virtue of this motor element 
the image alwavs tends to find outward expression. " . . . . l'element 
moteur de l'image tend a lui faire perdre son caractere purement 
interieur, a l'objectiver, a 1'exteriorer, a la projecter hors de nous " (p. 2). 
But Ribot fails to see anything creative in this tendency of the image 
to pass into an act. He distinguishes sharply between reprodutive and 
creative imagination. The criterion is the objective one. The repro- 
ductive imagination is that which gives rise only to the repetition of 
some act or object. To be creative, the imagination must result in 
something new. 

Ribot's work is a contribution to sociology rather than to psy- 
chology. Or it might be described as embodying a type of social 
psychology in which " l'element moteur " forms a sort of bridge 
between two sets of phenomena — one psychical or subjective, the 
other social or objective. Such a conception as this marks an advance 
over the conception previously referred to — the conception that there 
is an immediate, qualitative correspondence between certain types of 
mental imagery and certain activities or vocations. It gives us a 
glimpse of a mechanism between image and result, idea and fact. I 
am not attempting to express an appreciation of Ribot's work as a 
whole, with its clear, though not always convincing, analyses, and its 
suggestive comparisons. I merely wish to use certain points empha- 
sized in the work ; namely, the fact that an image, whether visual, 
auditory, or tactual, is always motor; and the fact that by virtue of 
this motor phase an image always tends to objectify itself in the world 
of fact. And yet there is nothing novel, or strikingly "creative," in 
these points. They are simply expressions or applications of the cur- 
rent doctrine of sensori-motor and ideo-motor reactions. 

What might be called the official work on the psychology of the 
imagination has not, it seems to me, brought to light results that have 
a very direct bearing upon the problems raised in our discussion of 
the imagination as treated by Spinoza and Hume. This cannot be 
urged as a criticism against the careful descriptive work that has been 
done, nor against the brilliant interpretations of recent French writers. 
But a solution will have to be sought in and through other phases of 
psychology. 



54 THE IMAGINATION IN SPINOZA AND HUME 

SEC. III. A PSYCHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF IMAGE-DEVELOPMENT. 

In this part of the discussion I am especially indebted to Profes- 
sor Dewey's reinterpretation of the doctrine of sensori-raotor reaction, 
as found notably in his article on the "Reflex- Arc Concept in Psy- 
chology" {Psychological Review, Vol. Ill, p. 357). 

The fundamental assumption with Spinoza and Hume — and with 
Ribot as well — the assumption that the sense element in experi- 
ence is externally imposed, is a datum ; an " impression," to use 
Hume's word ; " material," to use Ribot's — suggests the point at which 
analysis may be most effectively directed. If the assumption be 
granted, then we have either of two alternatives presented, according 
as we regard the recipient " faculty" of the mind as passive respecting 
its data, or as active. With Spinoza we may regard it as passive, and 
the problems already indicated (p. 48) will arise, the most pressing of 
which is perhaps the problem of individuality. What can be done for 
a self that is half bond and half free — half imagination and half 
reason ? Is it a self at all ? It takes a thoroughgoing empiricist, or 
associationist, like Herbert Spencer, for example, to push this concep- 
tion past Spinoza and on to its logical ultimatum, completely general- 
izing the method of forming the individual out of a continual raining 
in of sense-impressions — but at the expense of a complete dissipation 
of individuality. Spinoza was a semi-Spencerian. Or with Hume we 
may regard the imagination as actively recombining and projecting its 
sense data; and another set of difficulties will arise, chief among which 
is the wholly irresponsible character of the imagination thus conceived 
apart from its material. In short, the assumption, in whichever way it 
is taken, creates more difficulties than it solves. 

A counter-assumption which I wish to test on this group of prob- 
lems is the assumption that a sensation is not a given element, a 
datum, but appears as the locus of a problem. It marks or locates the 
point in the organic activity of an individual where the strain is great- 
est, where demand for readjustment is most acute. A sensation is the 
way in which strain seems to the individual — in that sense it is seem- 
ing rather than being. It is the appeal which the demand for read- 
justment makes to the individual — in that sense it is particular rather 
than universal. It does not presuppose organic activity as a basis. It 
is organic activity come to consciousness in the process of becoming 
more organic. The so-called reflex arc is not sensori-motor or ideo- 
motor, in the sense that it is made up of two joints or segments, one 
of which is sensory up to a certain point, and the other motor. The 



PSYCHOLOGY OF THE IMAGINATION 55 

" reflex arc," or, as it has been more aptly termed, the " organic cir- 
cuit " of stimulus and response, is either all sensory or all motor, 
depending upon whether it is a matter of immediate experience, or a 
matter of mediate or inferred experience ; depending upon whether 
it is my experience from my point of view, in which case it is sensory; 
or my experience from your point of view, in which case it is motor. 
A kinaesthetic sensation is as much a sensation as a visual or audi- 
tory sensation. And, conversely, a visual sensation involves motor 
adjustments as much as a kinsesthetic sensation. 

To say that a sensation appears as the locus of a problem does not 
mean that every sensation is to be so regarded. A sensation may be 
simply the point of least resistance in some habitual attitude or response 
which is anything but problematic. The barking of a distant dog breaks 
in upon my stream of consciousness as I write these lines. Since I have 
no jurisdiction whatever over that dog, the barking is barely perceived ; 
in other words, only the most habitual and elementary forms of audi- 
tory perception and interpretation are brought into play. The case 
might be very different, however, if I knew that I could exercise some 
sort of control over the dog. In that event I might allow myself to be 
irritated by the barking. The more I felt that it was in my power to 
do something to check the disturbance, the more the sensation in ques- 
tion would appear to be the locus of a problem. The rattling of a win- 
dow, the flapping of a curtain, the squeaking of a sign-board, are often 
almost entirely ignored, until it occurs to one that something can be 
done to stop the noise ; then, unless the suggestion is followed up with- 
out delay, the noise is liable to become a source of irritation, a locus of 
a problem. I doubt whether Carlyle had been so much disturbed as 
he was by the cackling of his neighbors' fowls, if there had not been 
some suggestion, however remote, of the possibility of Mrs. Carlyle's 
purchasing the offenders, as she finally did, and silencing them forever. 
Instead of its being true that a sensation is a datum given from with- 
out, it is more true to the facts of experience to say that when a sensa- 
tion is so regarded it is liable to be annihilated. Wholly from with- 
out ? Well, then it does not concern me; I can't help it. It is only 
when I feel myself to be in some way responsible for a sensation ; it is 
only when it arises within my range of activities, my habits of control, 
that it persists and grows more intense. 

The greatest difficulty that stands in the way of this assumption or 
hypothesis as to the nature of sensation would seem to be the objection 
that it is absolutely idealistic — if sensation is not given from without, 



56 THE IMAGINATION IN SPINOZA AND HUME 

then it must be given or produced from within — purely idealistic, 
subject to call, so to speak, and therefore not in any degree problem- 
atic. This difficulty or objection is really nothing but the same old 
assumption over again, though in an apparently new form. It arises 
because of the old tendency to deal with sensation as if it were a 
datum, if not given from without, then, forsooth, given from within. 
If the externally given sensation is to be regarded as materialistic, and 
the internally given sensation as idealistic, then from the standpoint 
of the present hypothesis it is a matter of complete indifference whether 
a materialistic or idealistic turn be given to the machinery. The pres- 
ent hypothesis simply takes sensation where it finds it, and attempts to 
give it a functional interpretation. One of the commonplaces of psy- 
chology is that sensation cannot be defined save in terms of itself. 
Carry this commonplace farther and the definition may be reached 
that sensation is, functionally, simply experience defining itself to itself. 
It may relieve the last statement of some of its metaphysical 
abstractness to consider the classification of sensations employed by 
several modern psychologists, notably by Kiilpe. By him sensations 
are classified into those peripherally excited and into those centrally 
excited, or into sensations as such, and images or ideas. This distinc- 
tion between peripherally and centrally excited sensations seems to be 
made on a purely structural or even anatomical basis. Sensations 
peripherally excited are psychical phenomena which necessarily involve 
the stimulation of a sense-organ. Those centrally excited are psychi- 
cal phenomena which necessarily involve the activity of some portion 
of the central nervous system, but not necessarily the stimulation of a 
corresponding sense-organ — the phenomenon may be experienced 
even though the sense-organ is no longer in existence. The distinc- 
tion does not deny the primary unity of the two sides, nor their subse- 
quent interdependence, but it does assert that they may become 
anatomically distinct from one another. Yet, being a structural or 
anatomical distinction, it may furnish the loci for a functional restate- 
ment. It suggests a division of labor, as well as a difference of 
position. Even in its present form it is a criticism upon the traditional 
view, held by Hobbes and his successors, that a mental image is a less 
vivid or decayed sense-impression. " The correctness of the assump- 
tion that images are merely weaker sense-perceptions has never been 
demonstrated," says Kiilpe, "and the constant assumption has done as 
much as anything else to render the department barren and schematic " 
{Outlines of Psy., p. 169). But any structural statement lays itself open 



PSYCHOLOGY OF THE IMAGINATION 57 

to just such a criticism as this. It has to be supplemented, and pos- 
sibly corrected, by a functional or physiological statement. How did 
the two loci ox foci of sensation arise ? What is their function in main- 
taining the life-process ? Under what conditions does an " organic 
circuit" become an organic ellipse ? 

The problem can be most readily approached, I believe, from the 
genetic and physiological side. 

It is a law of growth, on the physiological side, that habits previ- 
ously worked out independently of one another shall be combined, 
co-ordinated, to form a higher, more organic unity, which in its turn 
may become a habit, subject to combination with other habits : and 
so on indefinitely, or until growth ceases. This form of combination 
is not a mechanical putting together; it is organic, since each member 
of the co-ordination, each previously independent habit, undergoes 
reconstruction and also gains in efficiency through its interaction with 
the other members of the co-ordination. To illustrate, take the case of 
learning to swim. There are habits of pushing objects aside with the 
hands and arms, habits of kicking, habits of balancing the body, etc., 
which have been worked out independently of one another* at least so 
far "as the act of swimming is concerned. They are the necessary con- 
stituents of the act or habit of swimming that is to be ; but simply 
making them work together is not sufficient; they must be co-ordi- 
nated. Each habit has to be made over somewhat, reconstructed, 
through its interaction with the other habits involved. Each gains a 
new efficiency, in proportion as the act of swimming is mastered — as 
the co-ordination is realized. And this co-ordination, when realized, 
tends to become a habit, capable in turn of playing a part in some 
larger co-ordination yet to be. 

Two distinct factors of this law of growth are habits and co-ordina- 
tion ; and bound up with these is consciousness. Between habits, the 
achievements of the past, and co-ordination, the possibility of the 
future, stands the "specious present" of consciousness. Out of this 
"specious present" of consciousness with reference to habits on the one 
side, and to co-ordination on the other, arise the two foci of sensation, 
the peripherally and the centrally excited sensations — sensations as 
such and images or ideas. Sensations as such answer to habits, which 
are not quite what they were, because they are conflicting or inade- 
quately functioning under the stress of unwonted conditions. The 
image answers to the co-ordination that is to be, provided it is possible 
to anticipate the co-ordination. 



58 THE IMAGINATION IN SPINOZA AND HUME 

As to the possibility, on the physiological side, of anticipating a 
co-ordination. The sensory areas or centers of an infant are unco-ordi- 
nated. According to Flechsig, the mechanism for their co-ordination is 
lacking until the medullary sheaths of the connecting fibers or associa- 
tion centers ripen. " Noch einen Monat nach der Geburt sind die 
geistigen Centren unreif, ganzlich bar des Nervenmarkes, wahrend die 
Sinnescentrenschon vorher — ein jedes fur sich, vollig unabhangig von 
den andern — herangereift sind" {Gehirn und Seek, p. 23). Until the 
connecting fibers ripen there is no reason to suppose that the eye 
activity, say, influences in any organic way the hand or ear activity, 
unless it be through some subtle modification of that dark continent of 
inner environment, the blood supply. Naturally only random move- 
ments and instinctive acts are possible. The fingers close in response 
to a stimulus of the palm. In the same way, probably, the muscles of 
the eye respond to a stimulus of the retina. But neither hand nor eye 
movement can affect each other organically, until the nerve-fibers con- 
necting the eye and hand tracts become functionally mature and 
active. It seems probable that each type of movement develops as far 
as its isolation will permit ; but it is difficult to conceive how anything 
corresponding to a mental image could arise during this period. With 
the ripening of the connecting fibers, however, comes the possibility 
of the image. The eye-hand activity which now arises is a more com- 
plex activity, and one capable of a higher degree of organization, than 
either the eye or the hand activity by itself. At first each activity is 
an accidental stimulus to the other ; it shoots into the other, so to 
speak, at random. Only through such chance associations, followed 
by repeated trials and interaction, does the higher organization of the 
eye-hand activity come into existence and establish itself. In the case 
of the painter, to take an extreme example, this process of perfecting 
the organization of the eye-hand activity may be the work of a lifetime. 

The Anlage of the image thus approached from the genetic and 
physiological side is capable of being generalized and of having its 
mechanism stated in the following terms : At first, as I have already 
pointed out, the activity takes place in a wholly unanticipated, acci- 
dental way. There comes a time, however, with reference to a given 
stimulus, when a tension is bound to arise between the eye and the 
hand activity as independent reactions and the eye-hand activity as a 
co-ordinated reaction. It is not that the original eye activity is 
opposed to the original hand activity as such. But it is a conflict 
between the old way of doing things, represented by the instinctive 



PSYCHOLOGY OF THE IMAGINATION 59 

reaction of the eye activity as independent and the instinctive reaction 
of the hand activity as independent, and the new way of doing things, 
represented by the eye-hand co-ordination. In describing this tension 
we are at the same time describing consciousness, and also, what is 
more to our purpose, the origin and function of the image in its rela- 
tion to sensation. (I am using the terms "image" and "sensation " 
as equivalent respectively to centrally and peripherally excited sensa- 
tions.) The "image is the incipient eye-hand co-ordination in its 
tension with the incipient eye and hand reactions. The image stands 
for the persistence of previously haphazard co-ordinations ; the sensa- 
tions stand for immediate eye and hand reaction. The image is the 
incipient eye-hand co-ordination in its tension with the incipient eye 
and hand reactions. The sensations are the incipient eye and hand 
reaction in tension with the incipient eye-hand co-ordination. (I am 
not using the terms " co-ordination " and " reaction" to mark a radical 
distinction. Co-ordination is simply a more complex, more mediated 
reaction. Reaction denotes the more direct and immediate response.) 
The greater the tension, the more comprehensive the image, and the 
more definite the sensation. 

Professor James, in his chapter on " Will," has shown how all volun- 
tary action is a function of the image or sensation attended to, though 
it seems necessary to him to postulate in addition a. fiat, a sort of " le 
roi le veut." Our hypothesis can accept and utilize in toto Professor 
James's analysis of the mechanism of volition without at the same time 
being obliged to use the remnant of monarchy which is bound up in 
the doctrine of the fiat. Activity is a fundamental characteristic of the 
self. The problem is how this activity shall' be organized and 
expended. The image is the element of control as against sensation 
or tendencies to immediate response. It represents a more adequate 
mode of freeing activity as against merely impulsive or instinctive 
action. Yet both image and sensation appear as the problematic 
points in the situation. The co-ordination can be expressed only 
through the reconstruction of relatively partial reactions. On the 
other hand, in asserting themselves as sensations these reactions at the 
same time define the condition which the more highly organized 
activity must meet and utilize. The process of consciously recon- 
structing previous types of reaction, and the tension between co-ordi- 
nation and reaction which appears as a conflict between two sets of 
sensations — centrally and peripherally excited — are equivalent expres- 
sions. The activity which reconstructs, or which defines itself to itself 
in sensations, or which finds expression in overt movements, is one. 



60 THE IMAGINATION IN SPINOZA AND HUME 

I have implied that the image is the persistence of previously hap- 
hazard co-ordination. This would seem to mean that the image is 
simply a revival. Taken in itself, this would be true, but the image is 
not to be taken in itself; it has to be taken in its relations, in its ten- 
sion, to previously isolated reactions. With reference to them it is not 
a revival ; they are rather the revivals. It is an anticipation of a fuller 
and freer activity into which these previously isolated activities may 
pass, and find organic membership. 

It will be seen at once how close this is to the view which Hume 
took of the imagination. The value of Hume's analysis with reference 
to this point has not been recognized, and can hardly be overestimated. 
The "propensive," projective, anticipatory character of the image — 
that is precisely its function, as Hume clearly saw. It is interesting 
to recall, in passing, Spinoza's identification of the imagination with 
the gift of prophecy. True, Spinoza placed the emphasis on the 
receptive, sense-content aspect of the imagination, rather than on its 
forward, anticipatory movement. And yet, if prophecy deserves the 
name, it is a foretelling. 

We cannot rest the case, however, on this somewhat speculative 
attempt to approach the problem from the genetic and physiological 
side. It was simply an attempt to get the benefit of a view of the 
matter from without before looking at it from within; before looking 
at it as it appears in the individual's stream of consciousness; that is, 
before approaching the problem from the psychological side. Doubt- 
less it would be either gratuitous or else "metaphysical" to develop 
the point which underlies this discussion, namely, that these two 
sides, the. physiological and the psychological, have little or no signifi- 
cance apart from one another, and that both are abstractions arising in 
one activity, in one life-experience. The point more relevant to this 
discussion is concerned with how the relations between sensations and 
image are experienced; and finally, what is the consciously experienced 
relation between what we call the imagination and reason. This is not 
to be concerned with how sensations are received from things, nor 
how "brain paths" are wrought — these are questions rather of psycho- 
physics or of metaphysics — but the problem is to take sensations and 
images as we find them and to seek what is their function in experi- 
ence. This is in harmony, I believe, with the attitude taken by Locke 
when he said, at the beginning of his Introduction : , 

I shall not at present meddle with the physical consideration of the mind; 
or trouble myself to examine, wherein its essence consists, or by what motions 



PSYCHOLOGY OF THE IMAGINATION 6 1 

of our spirits, or alterations of our bodies, we come to have any sensations by 
our organs, or any ideas in our understandings ; and whether those ideas do 
in their formation, any, or all of them, depend on matter or no : These are 
speculations, which, however curious and entertaining, I shall decline, as 
lying out of my way in the design I am now upon. It shall suffice to my 
present purpose, to consider the discerning faculties of a man, as they are 
employed about the objects, which they have to do with. 

"To consider the discerning faculties of a man," and to consider 
them with reference to the carrying on of the business of life, whatever 
that may chance to be, or "as they are employed about the objects 
with which they have to do," is to be concerned with a psychological 
problem close to the one we now have in hand. 

I shall try to be brief, for the points I wish to bring to attention 
are too obvious to need extended treatment; they are all on the 
descriptive rather than on the explanatory level. 

i. The experience of a sensation of some kind is essential to the 
carrying on of any habitual activity, and a fortiori of any unaccus- 
tomed activity. By habitual activity I mean an acquired or learned 
activity, one that has passed through the readaptive process of con- 
sciousness, s.uch as walking, writing, etc.; and I would exclude, of 
course, all purely reflex, automatic, and instinctive acts. The latter 
are rather the raw materials, if they are not the finished products, out 
of which habits are constructed. 1 The need of sensations in the form- 
ing of a new habit is too patent to require more than a mere mention. 
But the need of sensations in carrying on some well-established habit 
is sometimes in danger of being overlooked, because the sense factor 
maybe so "remote," to use Professor James's word, so reduced in 
character, as to lose itself in the " fringe" of consciousness. Take, for 
example, the habit of writing, the habit of forming verbal symbols in 
script. It is only necessary to close the eyes while using the pen to 
note how dependent the habit is upon the visual sensations of the 
materials and movements involved. Professor Baldwin's analysis of 
handwriting, in Mental Development, Methods and Processes, is espe- 
cially instructive as to the details of this illustration. 

2. Granted that a sensation of some kind, no matter how remote 
and reduced — it may even be of the kind that is "centrally excited" — 

1 It is not intended to discriminate rigorously between automatic reflexes and habits; nor, on the 
other hand, is it deemed essentia] to the argument to reckon with the possibility of habits shading into 
reflexes. It is not a questioiTof terms or of nomenclature. A habit may continue to be called a habit, if 
anyone likes, even after it becomes completely automatic, or operated by stimuli that do not rise above the 
threshold of consciousness. The aim of this part of the discussion is simply to indicate a functional rela- 
tion between sensations and habits, or acquired co-ordinations — some habits, if not all. 



62 THE IMAGINATION IN SPINOZA AND HUME 

is essential to the carrying on of a given habit, it is to be expected that 
in a specific case the absence of the appropriate sensation or sensations 
will render impossible the functioning of the habit. The reaction, if 
it takes place at all, will fail of the sureness and smoothness of the 
habitual reaction ; it will tend to become wavering, spasmodic, too 
intense or too feeble, as the case may be. Either a new habit has to 
be worked out with reference to the sensations or stimuli actually 
present, or else the appropriate stimuli have to be discovered. An 
important function of the image is to direct the search for the appropriate 
stimuli. It is quite possible, I repeat, that when the appropriate 
s'timuli are absent, a new habit may be formed with reference to the 
stimuli actually present ; but this is liable to involve a long and con- 
scious interruption of some process more or less essential to the life of 
the organism. If, when the interruption is first felt, an image comes 
to consciousness which reveals the appropriate stimuli in their associa- 
tion with the present situation, a search may be undertaken for the 
stimuli and the habit administered with due economy. The so-called 
laws of the association of ideas — contiguity, similarity, contrast, 
cause and effect, and the rest — are the mechanism of which the image 
is the definition, the specific instance, in directing the search for the 
stimuli appropriate to the functioning of a given habit. In the pres- 
ence, then, of the interruption of some habit through the absence of 
appropriate sensations or stimuli, the image comes in as a more 
adequate representation of the situation than the immediate sense- 
perceptions can afford, as a filling out of the incomplete, the imperfect, 
and as a means of selecting or passing to the appropriate stimuli. 
It is possible, also, for the image to reveal the impossibility of 
selecting appropriate stimuli, and hence the necessity of reconstructing 
the habit or of working out a new one. 

Suppose, for example, that, as I am writing these words, the supply 
of ink in the fountain pen suddenly gives out. The writing habit 
suffers interruption, not only because the movements of the pen will 
no longer leave a record that will be apparent to some possible reader, 
but because the writing movements themselves are dependent in a 
measure upon the visual sensations of the ink tracings that follow the 
pen. Even if I were to slip a sheet of carbon paper under the paper 
on which I am writing, so that a record could be obtained which should 
be visible to a possible reader, though not visible to me at the time of 
writing, I could not proceed as before. The look of the letters and 
the words as I write not only facilitates their comparatively regular 



PSYCHOLOGY OF THE IMAGINATION 63 

and legible formation, but also assists in the arrangement of the larger 
units of the sentence. Doubtless the habit of writing in my usual 
hand with a dry pen over carbon paper could be acquired without 
much expenditure of time or energy, but we will suppose in this case 
that it is neither necessary nor desirable. We will suppose also, for the 
sake of the illustration, that the ink bottle is not immediately at hand, 
and that the filling of the fountain pen has not become a purely 
habitual part of the writing act. The point is that the search for the 
ink bottle is directed by an image, if it be in any sense a conscious 
search. The image may be simply a vague feeling of tendency in a 
certain direction where the ink bottle is likely to be found, or, espe- 
cially in the presence of unsuccessful efforts to find it, the entire con- 
tents of a shelf, or of a room, say, may be vividly imaged in the 
attempt to locate the missing article. 

3. The sensations that have to do with the carrying on of habits 
are for the most part those lying in the "fringe" of conscious- 
ness. We have now to speak of sensations that lie in the focus of 
consciousness, and of the relation of the imagination to them. The 
function of sensations of this order has been implied under 1 and 2. 
The' interruption of a habit through absence of appropriate stimuli 
brings at the same time certain stimuli to consciousness which may 
have lain far below the threshold of consciousness. But the more 
palpable cases are those that arise in the interruption of a habit through 
conflicting habits, or through unusual and inappropriate stimuli. In 
such cases it is not so much a question of discovering the missing 
stimuli so that the old habit may go on, as it is of reconstructing the 
habit to meet the new demands of the situation. In all cases of inter- 
rupted habitual activities the sense factor locates the interruption, the 
strain, with reference to which a new adjustment has to be made. 
Take the case, for example, of a man who is about to make a speech 
before a large audience, and who is wholly unaccustomed to such an 
ordeal. Few under such circumstances would be fortunate enough to 
escape the distracting sensations that swarm to the surface of the stream 
of consciousness, coming from the lower regions of throat, lungs, heart, 
and diaphragm, and all indicating the interruption, the breaking up, of 
the speech habits and others, under the stress of unwonted and inap- 
propriate stimuli. 

4. It is possiblejjhat new adjustments may be worked out solely in 
the medium of peripheral sensations, without involving an image. 
But unless backed up by well-defined instincts, such a method of 



64 THE IMAGINATION IN SPINOZA AND HUME 

acquiring new adjustments is laborious and expensive, judged by the 
usual standards. Each new movement in the process has to be made 
haphazard, without anticipation of probable consequences; and the 
successful adjustment, when finally reached, is likely to represent the 
survival of a few fit and elect responses, over and above the many unfit 
and condemned. It is a case of the adage : " Experience is a hard 
school, but fools will learn at no other." True, no new habit or 
adjustment can be learned save through random and haphazard 
responses. But the fact should not be overlooked that, in the case of 
children, the environment, or stimuli, is controlled by their elders, so 
as to limit the range and direct the play of these random and hap- 
hazard responses, the result being that the child learns through the 
experience of the race as well as through his own experience ; and 
that, in the case of the more mature, models of various kinds, to say 
nothing of the imagination, play their part in economizing effort. 
New habits and adjustments may be acquired, to repeat, solely through 
the medium of the sensations, but in the interests of greater efficiency 
and economy the imagination enters as a factor. 

What is commonly termed learning through imitation lies between 
learning through merely immediate sense-perceptions and learning 
through the imagination, and may properly be considered by way of 
an intermediate step in the discussion. The model imitated, particu- 
larly if it be not a finished thing, but a process of making or doing 
something, performs the function of selecting stimuli for response on 
the part of the learner. It tends to limit the range and direct the play 
of his random and haphazard impulses. The model imitated does 
not have to be, of course, an immediately present external thing or 
process. It may be a memory image of the thing or process. Most 
of the plays of early childhood afford illustrations of how new habits 
are acquired through imitating a model held in the form of a memory 
image. (I am using the expression " memory image " in the sense in 
which Hume uses the expression " idea of memory," meaning a pretty 
literal reproduction of the sense " impression," rather than in the 
sense of an image consciously referred to the past.) The memory 
image functioning in this way is psychologically creative, in that it is 
instrumental in the forming of new habits and adjustments. 

But there arises a demand for greater efficiency and economy than 
that realizable through imitating either an external model or a memory 
image. Every break or interruption of the course of a habit is a 
unique event. The crisis will be met most economically if the 



PSYCHOLOGY OF THE IMAGINATION 65 

resources of the past experience of the individual, not of anyone else to 
the exclusion of his own, be brought to bear. No memory image will 
meet the situation most effectively, because the situation is new; it is a 
break in the habitual. It must be an idea of the imagination, to use 
Hume's expression — an image which reconstructs and projects the old 
to meet the new. 

Modern drama and fiction are rich in illustrations of this point. 
The plot conflict frequently centers about the success or failure of some 
dominant idea of the imagination, as conceived by some individual, to 
meet the situation. We are not interested, as a rule, in how success- 
fully one character may imitate another, except in burlesque; but we 
are interested in how a character faces a difficulty, a break in the course 
of his career, a problem ; and we follow eagerly his attempt to bring his 
own resources to bear, whether he be a Prospero, winning almost perfect 
triumph through the range and power of his ideas, or a Caliban, almost 
entirely at the mercy of his own impulses and external circumstances. 

To sum up the points made on the physiological and on the psycho- 
logical sides : 

1. The Anlageol the image, the physiological condition, comprises 
the association fibers connecting the various lines of sensori-motor activ- 
ity. To say that the association fibers connect various brain-centers 
might be misleading, unless it be understood that in connecting centers 
they are also connecting peripheries. It is the whole sensori-motor 
activity, including sense-organ, nerve-fiber, muscle, or gland, that is 
connected with other sensori-motor activities by means of the asso- 
ciation fibers. Even this is possibly misleading, as implying that the 
association fibers are somehow external or adventitious to the sensori- 
motor activities. The co-ordination of various sensori-motor activities, 
of which the association fibers are the physiological mechanism and 
the image the conscious representation, is, so to speak, a " union loop," 
constituted by the various sensori-motor lines. 

The image arises in the tension between the new co-ordination and 
the older, more immediate, sensori-motor reactions. 

2. On the psychological side the image comes to consciousness as 
the means for directing a search for stimuli or sensations appropriate 
either to the carrying on or to the reconstruction of a habit which has 
been interrupted, either through lack of appropriate stimuli or through 
the presence of inappropriate stimuli and conflicting habits or 
impulses. The image may be either a memory image — in other words, 
a reproductive or imitative image — or it may be a reconstructive image, 



66 THE IMAGINATION IN SPINOZA AND HUME 

an image of the imagination — to put it tautologically. But in either 
case it is a creative image, in that it modifies the response — continues 
the functioning of a habit or directs its reconstruction. 

Putting the physiological and the psychological sides together, we 
note that the image is not simply a faded copy of sense-impression, 
and that the imagination is not simply either the passive recipient or 
the arbitrary manipulator of so much sense-material given from with- 
out ; but that the image is a conscious anticipation and selection of the 
conditions that will free impulses and organize them into useful habits, 
representing as it does a co-ordination of sensori-motor reactions; and 
that the co-ordination of sensori-motor reactions becomes effective as 
a co-ordination, because it does anticipate and select stimuli that are 
essential to its realization, and is not dependent solely on the reactions 
and stimuli immediately present. 

It is evident, I presume, that an assumption which underlies this 
discussion is concerned with the nature of habit. I do not propose to 
argue the assumption here, but merely to mention it. No attempt is 
made to go back of habit into original instincts and impulses, because 
it seems probable that in the process of transforming instincts and 
impulses into habits the image plays little or no part ; the transforma- 
tion is assumed to take place through the medium of sensations, the 
instincts standing for ready-made, inherited co-ordinations — uncon- 
scious images, to put it paradoxically. In this discussion the existence 
of habits is taken for granted, and we are concerned with habits which 
do not function wholly below the level of consciousness, but which 
require some conscious element, sensation, or image, no matter how 
remote or reduced. The function of the image is to economize the 
process of transforming one habit or set of habits into another. A 
habit is an adjustment to a relatively fixed environment, or set of 
stimuli. But the environment moves on ; new conditions arise ; new 
demands have to be met. The habit is interrupted. The various 
sensori-motor reactions involved in a habit are shaken loose, so to 
speak, like strands of a broken cable. The points of interruption, of 
strain, are located by sensations. The reconstruction of the habit to 
meet the new conditions may be made through the medium of periph- 
eral sense-experience exclusively, but only at a wasteful cost of time 
and energy. The function of the image is to diminish this cost of 
time and energy through anticipating and selecting stimuli appropriate 
to the reconstruction of the habit. This habit has not functioned 
hitherto as a separate thing. It is part of a co-ordination, part of what 



PSYCHOLOGY OF THE IMAGINATION 67 

is sometimes called a "bundle of habits." The image is this fact come 
to consciousness. The image anticipates only as it retrospects. It is 
pro-pensive, to use Hume's word, only under the momentum of past 
experience. 

There remains to consider the relations of the imagination to 
reason, a problem set both by Spinoza and by Hume. With both, the 
imagination and reason are, finally, incompatible categories. True, 
as I have already pointed out (pp. 47 fL), Spinoza and Hume do not 
agree as to the function and value of these categories. It is reason, 
according to Hume, that informs us that our perceptions are inter- 
rupted (in this respect reason corresponding exactly to Spinoza's defi- 
nition of the imagination); whereas it is the imagination, according 
to Hume, that makes possible an idea of the continuity of the objective 
world, to which our interrupted perceptions refer (in this respect cor- 
responding exactly to Spinoza's definition of reason). This very 
transposition of terms only brings out more clearly how both were at 
this point grappling with the same problem — the old problem of the 
one and the many. It is a case where transposition of terms does not 
alter the balance of the equation which states the problem. Rather is 
it where they most nearly agree in the use of terms that they differ 
most widely in meaning and in form of solution. Both agree that 
the imagination is the essence of individual variation. But with Spi- 
noza this locates the source of error and confusion ; whereas with Hume 
this locates the last resort, if not for truth, at least for the possibility 
of truth. Both agree that reason can originate no new idea. But with 
Spinoza reason is a way of becoming conscious of laws given by God ; 
whereas with Hume it is a way of becoming conscious of laws given by 
custom. Both agree that the materials of the imagination are sense 
data given from without. But with Spinoza the imagination is con- 
ceived as passively receptive ; whereas with Hume it is conceived as 
actively manipulating and recombining its data. Even in their appar- 
ently final and complete agreement that the imagination and reason 
are incompatible, Spinoza proposes the absolute exclusion of one cate- 
gory, the imagination, from the realm of philosophy; whereas Hume 
continues to keep house with both on his hands. 

I think we are prepared to recognize that from a psychological 
point of view the imagination is not always compatible with reason. 
The imagination has the defects of its qualities. Its characteristic 
function of transcending the immediately present, in order to direct 



68 THE IMAGINATION IN SPINOZA AND HUME 

the search for stimuli appropriate to the continuance or recon- 
struction of essential habits, demands a certain range for free play 
which may, particularly in the event of failure to discover the appro- 
priate stimuli, be converted into license. The so-called laws of associa- 
ciation — contiguity, similarity, and the rest — which are the mechanism 
by which the resources of past experience are brought to bear on a 
particular situation, may, especially in the case of failure, continue to 
run on their own momentum, one idea calling up another, in a sort of 
endless chain of mind-wandering. The energy which should have 
been directed toward meeting the concrete situation and in forming 
practical habits of conduct becomes diverted into mere play of mind, 
into mere day-dreaming. Action, instead of being controlled through 
ideas, is postponed for the sake of the satisfaction that attends the flow 
of centrally aroused sensations. When the actual conditions of action 
are lost sight of — which is only another way of saying that the periph- 
erally excited sensations are ignored — the play of imagery runs 
away with itself; it becomes capricious, untrustworthy, and misleading. 
To use a mathematical comparison again, the imagination which first 
emerges as one of the foci of an organic ellipse may become para- 
bolic, and even hyperbolic. 

And yet it does not cease to be a function of the cone of experi- 
ence. It is precisely at this point in the analysis that the adequate 
idea, or reason, is seen to have its place. The adequate idea, or 
reason, is the deeper principle of habit or control which lies back of 
the play of imagery. It is the idea which is adequate, equal to, a 
match for, the demands of the actual situation. In a sense, it is older 
and more fundamental than the imagination, for it is the side of 
response which is present in -the first instinctive reaction. But at the 
same time it is one with the imagination, being the imagination as 
controlling most effectively the given situation through the free play 
of its own resources. Reason is the imagination in focus, both in the 
physical and in the mathematical sense of the word. 

It is significant to note that comparatively little imagery is associ- 
ated with reason. A concept or an idea, or a purely intellectual 
process, is described as a pale, washed out, abstract thing, in contrast 
with the rich, sensuous content of the imagination. It is usually taken 
for granted that the imagination is somehow closer to sense-percep- 
tions, more of the earth, earthy; whereas concepts, ideas, reason, are 
more remote, transcendent, spiritual. It is quite possible that the 
negative virtues thrive with most safety to their possessors in the soil 



PSYCHOLOGY OF THE IMAGINATION 69 

of reason ; for a negative virtue planted in the soil of the imagination 
is liable to become a luxuriant vice. From a psychological point of 
view, however, there is no distinction of value between reason and the 
imagination. The distinction between the two is one of sensuous 
content, as has just been indicated, and this is to be interpreted as one 
of function. A concept, like a habit, is carried on, is consciously con- 
trolled, by ..means of a sense factor, which is usually exceedingly 
remote and reduced. In the case of a concept the sense factor is cen- 
trally excited ; in other words, an image. In the case of a habit the 
sense factor is more frequently peripherally excited ; in other words, 
a sensation. But even this distinction between concept and habit is 
rather arbitrary. By either is meant a consciously acquired process 
which is carried on with the minimum of conscious attention. 
Reason, as Hume pointed out, is not engaged in originating new 
ideas. Neither is habit. Their business is to continue the function- 
ing of those already originated and worked out. It is true also, as 
Spinoza pointed out, that reason is adequate. It is the adjustment so 
completely worked out, so equal to, so adequate to the situation, that 
it is functionally one with it. Within the province in which it works 
reason's control, the control of the adequate idea, is supreme. What 
wonder that a philosopher should wish to make that province the uni- 
verse, or the universe that province! 

An idea of the imagination, however, represents control as ideal, 
not as fact. It represents a possible process of reconstructing adjust- 
ments and habits; it is not an actual adjustment. Its sensuous con- 
tent is richer and more varied than that of reason, for only in this way 
can it anticipate conditions and bring about responses in the process 
of learning the new adjustment. It arises normally in a stress, in the 
presence of fresh demands, and new problems. It looks forward in 
every possible direction, because it is important and difficult to foresee 
consequences. But suppose the new adjustment to be made with reason- 
able success — reasonable, note. Suppose the ideal to be realized. 
With practice the adjustment becomes less problematic, more under 
control — that is, it comes to require less conscious attention to bring 
it about. The image loses some of its sensuous content. It becomes 
worn away, more remote, until at last it becomes respectably vague 
and abstract enough to be classed as a concept. The imagination, 
then, is the essential reconstructive process between habit and habit ; 
between concept and concept ; between reason and reason. 

If control be anything else but self-control, then reason and the 



70 THE IMAGINATION IN SPINOZA AND HUME 

imagination are incompatible. Reason becomes the outer, external 
law, fate, custom, or substance, to which the individual must conform 
or perish ; and the imagination becomes the unseen caprice, the idle, 
self-deceptive dreaming, of the unregenerate individual. But if con- 
trol be won through conscious effort and maintained through con- 
scious experience, then the imagination and reason are simply stages 
in one process. 



APPLICATIONS AND CONCLUSION. 

It is apparent, no doubt, that the psychological analysis of the 
imagination which has been undertaken above is closer to Hume than 
to Spinoza. How is it to avoid the difficulties that confronted 
Hume's analysis of the same faculty? Or, if we may cast the burden 
of the proof upon Hume, why the difficulties that arose in his attempt 
to make the imagination the carrier of the ideas of causation and of 
substance ? We cannot lay the blame of all of them to his doctrine 
of sense-impressions, and images derived after the manner of Hobbes 
from sense-impressions. Such a doctrine might even dissociate mental 
imagery from the body of sense-impressions so far as to make one 
the mere ghost of the other; and yet, if the imagination does work 
in an orderly and progressive manner, it might still be described as 
the carrier of the ideas of causation and of substance ; just as ghosts 
might be conceived of as rational beings dwelling in a real world like 
the gods of old, and influencing the course of events in harmony with 
the decrees of fate. Not metaphysical difficulties so much as actual 
psychological difficulties stared Hume. in the face and were frankly 
acknowledged. The imagination is not always orderly and progres- 
sive. It is often capricious and ambiguous. Hume saw that the 
imagination is the distinctively subjective element ; a potency, not a 
resultant; anticipating, prophetic — to recall Spinoza — not prede- 
termining. And vet it was at the same time the only element left to 
Hume which could carry anything. It was the only element possess- 
ing the quality of continuity and capable of transcending the present 
moment. Hence it was loaded down with those great objective cate- 
gories of causation and substance ; and, mere ghost that it was, it 
broke down under the strain. 

The image comes to consciousness in the conflict between tend- 
encies to action. The presence of the image marks the stage as 
incomplete, as an experience in the process of being transformed, 
reconstructed. Taken in itself, the stage is but a cross-section of a 
given situation ; not the complete experience that is to be. To regard 
such a stage as complete in itself is to mistake a part for a whole, a 
function for a structure. It is true that this stage is no mere abstrac- 
tion from the sense-elements of experience, as many of the older 

7i 



72 THE IMAGINATION IN SPINOZA AND HUME 

psychologists would have us believe; even in its earliest and crudest 
form it is a kind of rehearsal of the performance that is to come later. 
As a rehearsal it has to be as absorbing as the performance itself ; and, 
though on a reduced scale, it may give as full a sense of power and of 
satisfaction. But apart from the performance it is meaningless. It is 
incomplete in itself. The real test of a rehearsal is always the per- 
formance. And, furthermore, the character of the performance will 
determine the foa of attention in a subsequent rehearsal. 

The weakness in Hume's theory of the imagination lay in its fail- 
ure to locate the test of truth in action itself. The imagination is but 
the half-way house on the road to this destination, and is not the per- 
manent abiding-place of the objective categories of causation and 
substance. It can be held responsible only in and through the action 
that emerges as the expression of its anticipatory function. It is true 
that the imagination involves in its activity the use of the categories 
of causation and substance, just as a rehearsal of a drama involves the 
stage itself; we can go farther and say that in the activity of the 
imagination, or in the tension that this activity represents, these cate- 
gories come to consciousness as the conditions of action and take on 
new meaning; just as in the rehearsal of a drama the stage, its 
machinery and accessories, receive a larger share of attention, it may 
be, than in the actual performance. But the imagination cannot on 
this account be conceived as the sole carrier of these categories. In 
the imagination these categories represent the conditions of action. In 
the forthcoming experience, in the performance itself, they are the 
conditions of action. 

By way of final application of the points brought to attention in 
the psychological analysis undertaken above, let us return to the sum- 
mary of problems on p. 48. 

1. To what extent is the imagination to be held responsible for 
the detached, fragmentary particulars of experience? (Spinoza.) 

Compared with reason, as has already been pointed out pp. 68- 
69, the imagination is much the richer in sensuous content, because it 
represents the conscious attempt to control the making of a new 
adjustment or habit, whereas reason stands for the acquired adjust- 
ment. In this sense the imagination is responsible for the particulars 
of experience, that is, it brings them to consciousness in the process 
of directing a reconstruction of experience. Nevertheless, in this 
conscious attempt to control economically the making of a new adjust- 
ment or habit, the imagination can at best only approximate the selection 



APPLICA TIONS AND CONCL USION 7 3 

of the appropriate stimuli. It must of necessity include as well 
stimuli that are not appropriate. Its forecast is more or less problem- 
atic. There is truth, therefore, in holding the imagination respon- 
sible, as Spinoza does, for the detached and fragmentary particulars of 
experience. It is only when the imagination is viewed as a faculty 
which passively receives impressions from without, that this character- 
istic becomes a consuming fault. Once let the imagination be viewed, 
not as passively receptive, but as a recombining, anticipatory, "pro- 
pensive" faculty, and this characteristic is seen to be responsible rather 
to the novelty of the situation which the imagination is attempting to 
meet, than to any inherent flaw in the faculty itself. 

2. How far can the imagination be dissociated from the under- 
standing or reason ? (Spinoza.) 

From a psychological point of view, that is, from the point of view 
of the analysis of experience as maintained by the individual, the two 
cannot be dissociated. They are different stages in one rhythmic pro- 
cess. They are as essential to one another as any two things that are 
polar. Reason is the side of acquired, organized control ; it is the 
ratio, the well-devised and tested plan. In a universe that manifested 
nc change or progress, that might be all there was to it. But reason 
is continually being outgrown by life. The procession moves on. 
Demands arise that old adjustments, reason, cannot meet. An unknown 
quantity, an x, develops in the equation between the adequate idea 
and the nature of things. No manipulation of previous equations, or 
of cut-and-dried formulas, will alone suffice. The situation is unique. 
The value of x is new. That sense of the particularity of the situa- 
iton — the "thisness" of the logicians — is the sensation or "impres- 
sion." The appreciation of the sensation in the light of previous 
adjustments and habits, the interpretation of the break in this particu- 
lar habit or set of habits, the conscious anticipation of stimuli appro- 
priate to the reorganization of adjustments in order that the difficulty 
may be surmounted, are suggestions of what is the function of the 
imagination. The success of the function of the imagination in a 
particular case is the command for its own decline. The successful 
adjustment becomes through practice more and more a possession of 
reason. Control comes to be exercised with the minimum of conscious 
stimulus. Yet this adjustment, too, may later be brought into diffi- 
culties, though not exactly as before. So organically are reason and 
the imagination related in progressive experience that it would be 
truer to say that reason is the imagination generalized, and the imagi- 



74 THE IMAGINATION IN SPINOZA AND HUME 

nation is reason particularized — which means that the analysis is not 
to be pushed to the extreme limit, lest the reality which it dissects 
come to life and escape the bounds of word-distinctions. 

3. To what extent is the imagination a unifying, anticipating 
activity ? (Hume.) 

4. To what extent is the imagination co-operative with reason ? 
(Hume.) 

5. Why does the imagination fail to give a firm foundation to a 
rational system of philosophy — especially to the concepts of causation 
and substance, meaning by substance continued and independent 
existence ? (Hume.) 

These points are so closely related that they may be briefly dis- 
cussed as one. 

I have dwelt upon the value of Hume's theory of the imagination 
as a recombining, unifying, anticipatory activity, a theory which is 
both a criticism of Spinoza's theory of the imagination and a distinct 
contribution to modern psychology. I have attempted to point out, 
on the other hand, the hostility between the imagination and reason, 
which grows more open and acute with the development of the Treatise, 
and we have seen that Hume came to doubt the value of the imagina- 
tion as a foundation of a rational system of philosophy. Both Spinoza 
and Hume doubted the compatibility of reason and the imagination. 
Their doubts can be shown to flow, I believe, from two psychological 
assumptions held in common : (1) the assumption that an analysis of 
the conditions of experience could be stated ultimately in terms of 
knowledge, instead of in terms of action ; and (2) the assumption that 
the data of the imagination and of the perceptive faculties were so 
much material given from without. 

Spinoza's ideal was, as we have already seen (p. n), a character 
consisting of a knowledge of the unity existing between the mind and 
the whole of nature. If such a character or such a knowledge could 
be obtained, it would undoubtedly be reason, the unity, as controlled 
or habitual. The existence of the imagination, from this point of 
view, is plainly an evidence of failure to attain this character consisting 
of knowledge. If philosophy, as Spinoza seems to imply, be that per- 
fect character consisting of a knowledge of the unity existing between 
the mind and the whole of nature, it can have no room finally for the 
category of the imagination. 

Hume's ideal seems to have been the stating of the world in terms 
of the ideas of individual experience — again a knowledge ideal — and, 



APPLICATIONS AND CONCLUSION 75 

as we have seen, he found himself caught in a dualism between reason 
and the imagination. He discovered that reason tells us " that all 
our distinct perceptions are distinct existences, and that the mind 
never perceives any real connection among distinct existences " (p. 46, 
supra). Reason cuts the very substance of the world out from under 
the feet of individual experience. "Did our perceptions either inhere 
in something simple and individual, or did the mind perceive some 
real connection among them, there would be no difficulty in the case" 
(p. 46, supra). Hume also discovered that the imagination makes 
possible the ideas of causation and of substance, which reason denies. 
But he left the imagination where he discovered it, hanging in mid- 
air, like his man in the iron cage. 

The point made in criticism of the assumption that an analysis of 
the conditions of experience can be stated ultimately in terms of knowl- 
edge, is that psychologically reason and the imagination represent 
mutually essential degrees of conscious control over action. Reason is 
the more effective, more complete, and therefore less conscious instru- 
ment of control. Imagination is the directing of a process of read- 
justment, and therefore is a more conscious instrument of control. 

" The second assumption (the numbering of the assumptions is, of 
course, a matter of no moment), namely, that the data of the imagina- 
tion and of the perceptive faculties are so much material given from 
without, is involved in our last problem : 

6. Does the imagination simply receive or operate upon ready- 
made data, conveyed to it through the sense-organs ? To what extent 
is it merely receptive ? To what extent is it creative ? (Spinoza and 
Hume.) 

To assume that sense data are literally data, or given from without, 
ready-made, is open to objection, if for no other reason, on the ground 
of the difficulties and contradictions which it involves. If sense data 
are distinct existences, as their plurality would imply, then we have 
on our hands Hume's problem of trying vainly to relate them. Imagi- 
nation may succeed'in tying them together, but reason says : "No, they 
come as many from without; and the without from which they come I 
know only as I know them — and I know nothing simple and individual 
in which they inhere." The psychological view that sensations, what- 
ever else they are, and wherever else they may come from, are to be 
taken as we find them, and dealt with according to their function in 
locating critical points in experience, avoids a metaphysical problem 
which deserves dissolution rather than solution. 



76 THE IMAGINATION IN SPINOZA AND HUME 

As to the latter part of the problem. Psychologically, every image, 
and, for that matter, every sensation, is creative. It is creative in that 
it is a stimulus ; it modifies action or habits in some way. Every 
image recreates in some way the physical and psychical disposition of 
the individual organism that experiences it. As Professor James 
says in his chapter on "The Stream of Thought," there "is no proof 
that the same bodily sensation is ever got by us twice Every sen- 
sation corresponds to some cerebral action. For an identical sensa- 
tion to recur it would have to occur the second time in an unmodified 
brain. But as this, strictly speaking, is a physiological impossibility, 
so is an unmodified feeling an impossibility; for to every brain modi- 
fication, however small, must correspond a change of equal amount in 
the feeling which the brain subserves." (Principles of Psychology, Vol. 
I, pp. 231-3.) There are, of course, degrees in the modification 
undergone — degrees so wide apart as' to amount practically to differ- 
ences of kind — but it does not follow that the criterion of the creative 
character of an image is, as I understand Ribot to maintain (p. 53, 
supra), the novelty of the thing created. A thing whichls to all out- 
ward appearances perfectly commonplace may be the result of a tre- 
mendous reconstruction of individual habits; and a thing which to 
outward appearance is strikingly novel may be the result of compara- 
tively little readjustment of individual habits. 

Throughout this entire discussion there has been a constant 
endeavor, perhaps not always apparent, to search for and to appre- 
ciate, however inadequately, the positive value and significance to 
psychology of these theories regarding the imagination. 

The strength of Spinoza's theory of the imagination lies in its 
rejection of the fallacious scholastic doctrine which explains the forma- 
tion of abstract ideas or concepts as a process of agglutinating images. 
It is certainly true that ideas so formed would lack universality as 
much as the sense-materials out of which they were made. There 
could be no agreement between any two individuals as to the respect- 
ive contents of their minds. But in rejecting such a doctrine Spinoza 
also rejected individuality as such, in favor of that spiritual automaton 
which is the knowledge of its union with the whole of nature. The 
only doctrine regarding sensation and imagination that he could com- 
mand was one that compelled him to reject both categories from 
philosophy, and retain but the bare forms of thought, which reduce 
to identity. 

The strength of Hume's theory, on the other hand, lies in its 



APPLICATIONS AND CONCLUSION 11 

recognition of the imagination, not as mere revival, but as the indi- 
vidual's carrying forward, projecting, of the data of his experience. With 
Hume, however, as well as with Spinoza, the individual was an abstrac- 
tion. Spinoza left him the passive prey to outward circumstances; and 
pointed out that his salvation lay in becoming the zero of one member 
of a mathematical equation, the other member being Dens sive Natnra. 
Hume equipped him for progressive action, provided him with certain 
important instruments with which to control a world of objects ; and 
then failed to find him a field of action, a world in which to live. 

By a curious paradox, he who set out with intellectual unity — the 
unity of science — as his ideal, became the greatest separatist in the 
history of philosophy — his dualism cutting far deeper than Descartes's 
and into the very heart of character, of individuality. Whereas he who 
has been commonly regarded as the arch-skeptic undertook to found 
his most important philosophic categories on the forward movement of 
the imagination, which faculty is the basis, I think we may say, of the 
spirit of all prophecy. 

LofC 



Gbe TIlntvecsttB ot Chicago 

FOUNDED BY JOHN D. ROCKEFEU BR 



THE IMAGINATION IN SPINOZA 
AND HUME 

A COMPARATIVE STUDY IN THE LIGHT OF SOME RECENT 
CONTRIBUTIONS TO PSYCHOLOGY 

A DISSERTATION 

SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTIES OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOLS OF ARTS 

LITERATURE, AND SCIENCE, IN CANDIDACY FOR THE 

DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 

(department of philosophy) 



BY 

WILLARD CLARK GORE 






CHICAGO 
1902 



J^ 



Library of Congress 
Branch Bindery, 1903 



